On Gifts, Ghosts, and Gathering

By Catherine DiMercurio

It was one of those mornings where I woke up feeling melancholy for no apparent reason. Was it some residual sheen of sadness from a dream I no longer remembered? Who knows. Rather than fading with the darkness, the feeling amplified as I rose, took the dog out, brewed my pour-over coffee. Decaf to start, half-caf later. I am mindful with caffeine these days after decades of turning a blind eye to how it impacts my anxiety.

As the coffee dripped slowly through the five small holes I’d scooped out of clay, I tried to comfort myself by laying my hand on this warm, useful item I had made, the ceramic dripper through which my coffee now made its way and into the little pot I’d also crafted. It’s grounding to make and touch functional, pleasing pieces like this, and like walking across wet sand in bare feet, it often soaks the sadness right out of me. That morning though, it didn’t. That day the strange, seemingly source-less sadness built like a gathering wave and I stood in the kitchen and cried a little. I let myself, let myself run through possible reasons for the tears. I don’t usually get sad around birthdays, but I do have one coming up. Was there something in me grieving while the rest of me walked around, unaware that we should be doing something other than celebrating? After all, it will be my first birthday here in the new house, and I’ve given myself the gift of the lake. I had plans I was looking forward to, and had been feeling light and cheerful about it all. But some part of me held back.

As I stood there with the tears and the coffee dripping, I saw flashes of people I missed, and flashes of people I didn’t, and recalled one particularly painful memory of an ex-boyfriend who was aggressively mean on my birthday. I stayed with him a little too long before I got out of that relationship. That ugly memory resurfaces sometimes but it had been a while since I’d thought about it, about him. By the time the coffee had finished its journey into the little green pot, my tears had ceased falling but I still felt heavy and confused by the unexpected emotions. I hadn’t consciously been troubled by memories of loss, by recollections of unpleasant past birthdays, or anything like that. It’s always a little unclear what the path should be when those things arise: let the memories come, and “feel the feelings,” as they say, or distract myself so I don’t “dwell on the past.”

I took some deep breaths and then chose a mug that had been a gift from one of my children. Sipped the good coffee as I stood in the kitchen and waited to see if there were any more ghosts hovering about that needed some attention. When things seemed quieter if still a little cloudy, I sat in the living room and opened my laptop to write. In that instant, I felt dramatically and surprisingly better.

It was as if in that one small movement of opening the laptop, I had opened a little present. Here, let’s be purposeful now. It wasn’t my work computer and it wasn’t about being productive in that prickly, capitalistic way. Just, purposeful. Let’s write. See where we left off in the novel we’re revising, jot down these thoughts for a blog post, see if anything moved from “received” to “in progress” on the writing we’ve submitted.

(I’ve done it again, started talking about myself in the plural. My brain does that sometimes, gathers all of my selves together this way. It’s ok. We sometimes need gathering.)

I realized in that moment that even if all the thirteen active writing submissions I have out there in the world all get rejected, I will keep doing this. We will. While sharing my writing via publication is a delight—a rare one, to be sure, but definitely a delight—the physical shift in my body when it was time to write this morning was as big a gift to myself as the lake is. It’s nothing short of remarkable. I love that new things are always unfolding for me with pottery, and that sitting at the wheel makes me feel the same way that writing does. Yet writing is an older friend, one of my first friends. I still have a little bright green notebook of odd poetry I penciled onto those pages when I was ten. I love that writing keeps me connected to that someone I was so long ago.

I have grown used to the way the early sun angles through the east window in the living room at this time of the morning in the summer. The way it spills across my fingers on the keyboard, the way it spotlights my dog’s sleepy face next to me on the sofa. To digress on the sunlight for a moment: every day since I moved in last September, I have made a mental note of the way the light floods the house at different times of day, in the living room, the office, the kitchen, the bedroom. It’s well-positioned to receive sunrises and sunsets, and I’ve marveled at how the position of the sun changes with the seasons in a way I never really noticed at the old house, which was designed and situated in such a way that there was enough natural light.

I’m grateful that while some old griefs needed some tears and attention that particular recent morning, they lead me to this reminder of all the simple gifts we can give ourselves. For me it is writing, as an experience rather than a task, and one that feels purposeful and meaningful, even if no one else ever reads it, like a little clay vessel that might only ever live on my bookshelf or in my cupboard. No one else might ever use that oddly formed mug with its pretty sheen of subtle glazing, but that does not diminish its utility or the delight it gives me.

So here’s to our memories, the bad as well as the good, because they all remind us that we’re living full lives and chasing dreams. We’re following through and paying attention. We’re gathering joy and wisdom along with all the heartache we’ve also pocketed along the way. We keep trying to live a life that feels authentic and full and just right for us.

On Dirt and Clay and Flux

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s been a cold spring here so far, though things are starting to budge. Until recently, the daffodils surged about three inches above the soil and then stayed put. Usually, I’d see their lolling yellow blossoms by now, at least at the old house. It’s my first spring here and aside from the bulbs I planted in front of the house in the fall, everything else that might come up in the sandy soil in my new yard is a mystery.

I’m a haphazard gardener. I like to plant, and to nurture, and I love to be surrounded by flowers, but I’m not the most attentive in terms of what plants thrive where. I don’t want to drown in data, but I could be paying closer attention, and maybe with this yard, I finally will, instead of just plopping into the dirt whatever was on sale at the nursery, or whatever colorful bloom caught my eye. But it is also very likely that I will plant something that was on sale, in what I hope is a good spot, and cross my fingers.

At the old house, I prided myself for taming the overgrown yard I inherited when I moved in. In bringing back what had gone neglected. Here, there is much to do too, though I am pleased what is already on the property, a mature rhododendron, a forsythia deep in the back yard, the irises and hostas.

My gardening efforts represent slow processes of growth and discovery and labor. Moving into a new place, waiting to see what will bloom, deciding what to do next, then planting, but also pruning, tending, and doggedly removing invasive species that tend to take over neglected spaces. Already I’ve been yanking out the strangulating vines of an old honeysuckle. I go outside to play with the dog but suddenly my hands are in the dirt.

The slow rhythm of gardening appeals to me, and it’s similar to what I enjoy about pottery. There are many long steps in each process in ceramics, so many techniques to learn, skills to master. Sometimes I think all I can hope for is mild proficiency, not mastery, but I am pleased to be producing functional forms whose shapes and colors are appealing and often delightful. I’ve described pottery as a hobby but it’s really more of a practice. Like writing, it is something I need to do. Making something that is both artful and useful nourishes me, whether it’s a blog post, a poem, a story, a mug, a bowl. These all can be shared, held, used to connect. The haphazard gardening I do is a little different; the need is there but what I’m producing is more amorphous. I want my space to be both safe and pleasing, and the process is long and grubby (and in this way is much like pottery).

In all these things I find the slowness of the processes appealing and soothing; they complement another task I’ve been tackling. I feel like inside me are all these crumpled pieces of paper and I’m trying to find them and smooth them out and understand if what is written there is a riddle or a love note to myself or some secret key to understanding myself or life in general better. Maybe that’s why I’m often at peace in being alone these days, despite the periodic loneliness I wrote about in my last post. Deciphering myself for my own growth is one thing; doing that while interpreting myself for someone else is quite another. I guess that’s what everyone wants, in some fashion. To be known. Just to be known without translation or explanation.

The slowness I seem to be cultivating brings me the opportunity to understand. I try to remember who I was as a child, what delighted me, what made me laugh, what made me cry. I wonder when I began to feel the pressure to fit in, to behave differently, and why it was so hard. I recall that while fitting it in often eluded me, I could achieve a semblance of acceptance by being accommodating, by trying to be less intense, less sensitive, by hiding those things. Looking back, it is easy to see the ways in which whenever I slipped up, conflict brewed, or some other negative reaction surfaced. Now, I love laughing in the kitchen all alone with my dog at something one of us did, talking to myself, delighting in the moon, in my own kite-hearted joy every time I see the lake. I talk to the tree in the yard and make up silly songs. I have stretches of seemingly unsourced sadness that lingers until it has run its course, and then it dissipates. I allow it. I allow myself all the weird and plain and quirky and sensitive and everyday things about me to flourish, things that over the years one or another person has mocked or announced as strange or made me feel uncomfortable or ashamed about.

I am making up for lost time. I am making up for hiding from myself. I am making it up as I go along, how to live now, how to live well on my own terms. And, yes, it’s sometimes hard and sometimes lonely but it is a relief also to not be laughed at for my quirks and my foibles, to not be misunderstood or quieted or subdued by someone who found things easier if I carried myself through the world differently. I want to be around people who recognize my joy and want to share in it, or who see my periodic melancholy without assigning to it sources or blame; it’s just mine, and it will pass. Like anyone, I want to be accepted, respected. I don’t always expect to be understood, especially as I am still learning to understand myself. But it is always a relief when that happens.

I’m perpetually perplexed by people who seem to have themselves all figured out. Perhaps no one does but people carry themselves as if they do. Or maybe it’s not something most people think about. It has become plain to me over the years that the things that often trip me up offer no such obstacles to some other folks. I’ve been teased for being physically clumsy but I think that’s wrapped up in some other, internal clumsiness as well. Maybe that’s too pejorative of a term. There are things I want to make sense, but they never seem to, and they are hard to ignore. It could be something about a past event or a current situation, or something more, but I hate it when I can’t untangle it. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been called an overthinker.

I wonder what the trick is, to be confident in the midst of feeling that everything is in flux, in a state of change, or still being assessed, figured out. In pottery, there’s a type of glaze called a flux and it’s used in conjunction with other glazes. Its components work to bring about movement in the other glazes it is layered with. It’s gorgeous and tricky and fun. Maybe the secret to that confidence I envy in others is seeing the flux of life, of the own innerworkings of my head and heart, as gorgeous and tricky and fun, instead of an unsettled, clumsy thing that I won’t feel comfortable with until it is figured out.

Over the years, I’ve learned to accept some ambiguities that used to cause a lot of discomfort. I’m okay with not knowing how a piece of pottery will turn out; I’ve even grown to be okay with things not turning out well at all. But in life the stakes are higher than clay. We are often in situations for years before we’re aware of whether or not they are “turning out okay.” And typically, it is only after some time has passed can we evaluate what “okay” even meant in any situation.

I think one of the hardest things to do is find the peace within a moment when the larger situation is quite flux-y. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to things that urge me to slow down, to ponder the incremental inching of the daffodil stalk, to stare at the lake endlessly and simply hear it and watch the waves undulate, to nurture a lump of clay through all the steps that turn it into the vessel I sip coffee from. If I can stretch out a moment, I can find reprieve from the churning of my brain and its efforts to figure it all out. But what I want to work toward is being able to hold it all, hold the slow, stretched out moment not as escape from the churn and flux but as part of it. I want to feel how it’s all connected, but maybe getting there is a slow, clumsy process too. And maybe I’ll finally accept that there are things that will never make sense, aren’t supposed to make sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something to teach us.

Love, Cath

On Loneliness and Patience and Weather

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes I’m never lonely at all and sometimes it’s always winter. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about loneliness is that you don’t talk about it. Discussing it creates an awkwardness people don’t know what to do with, which leaves me with the feeling that I’m somehow obligated to feel shame about it, as if I have done something wrong by putting myself in this position.

The hard thing is that casual social interactions don’t assuage the type of loneliness that strikes me sometimes. It’s true that making new friends in a new place can be challenging, and I do feel the ache of that sometimes as I’m adjusting to life in my new town, but what is harder for me is the realization that none of the relationships I tried to build in the past ever blossomed into something with the kind of longevity I once hoped to be enjoying at this point in my life. There were recurring losses: of the possibility of various futures, of that close emotional intimacy with someone who really gets you.

Which is not to say these endings weren’t necessary. But also, I didn’t anticipate the way those accumulated losses would feel over time. What is astonishing is the way my own perceptions of loss and gain shift and morph. There’s a certain bliss I cherish, the peace that I have gained/earned that is the absence of the friction of being with the wrong person. [Obviously, friction happens, even with the right person, but with the right person, there’s enough underlying love and good will that occasional friction is simply something to work around.] There is also the absence of the anxiety I felt being with emotionally unavailable partners, an absence of the loneliness I felt upon recognizing when someone did not have the capacity to try to hold my pain as fully and as tenderly as I tried to hold theirs. And yet, sometimes the absence of not having someone to lean on, a shoulder to cry on, feels greater than those things. At times it seems I’ve traded one type of loneliness for another.

And then, the next day or the next week, I feel changed. Clear headed. When we’re in the depths of loneliness and the grief that comes with it, it’s easy to identify with it entirely. When it lifts it’s plain that it was not so much “just a feeling” but more like the weather, more like atmosphere, something we breathe in, something that impacts our daily living. But also, something that shifts, changes, improves. I wonder if in some language, the way we say I’m lonely is in my heart there is bad weather.

What I keep relearning is that so much of everyone’s lives involves the intricacies and negotiations of competing compensations: I lack this, but I have that, and this compensation is amenable to me. I have also found that winter whittles away at the balance that can be easier to find throughout the rest of the year. On a recent rare sunny day, I found that the gloomy internal cloud that made me feel so dark had dissipated and I wondered if all I’d really been missing was the sunlight on my face.

I’ve started pottery again. Waitlisted for a long while at a couple of studios, I decided to take matters into my own hands and set up a small studio in my basement. I found another potter who rents out kiln space. While this set up means I’m losing the social connections of a pottery studio community, it means I’m gaining the flexibility to be creative on my own schedule, rather than being tied to studio availability. There are other losses and other gains of this set up. It is amenable to me. It’s also been about as challenging as I expected it to be, reintroducing my hands to clay, to the wheel. I enjoy practicing. I love it when I easily center the clay and pull up nice even walls. It’s disappointing when I fail to do so. And I hate that I’m frustrated by such minor failures. I want to be a person who sees failure as part of the process, to respect it as such. I want to be in love with the whole process, not just the successes. Once again, pottery teaches me about life.

This winter has been a long process of slow growth and many frustrations, and little griefs that I mistakenly have counted as failures. But also it’s been a winter of little joys that don’t get celebrated enough, that I don’t celebrate enough.

I once had a pottery instructor tell me you’re really bad at being patient with yourself. She also admonished me on more than one occasion to not be so hard on myself. It’s not that I expect to make flawless art, but it is true that I’m constantly changing the rules for myself about what “good” and “enough” look like. I have learned that I often create a sense of urgency in situations where there really isn’t one, as if I have to get things “right” as quickly as possible. I’m trying to pause when that kicks in so I can discern if the urgency is real, so I can slow things down, let growth happen. So I can practice. So I can appreciate practice and process, all of it, in all kinds of weather.

It’s mid-February and winter isn’t over by a longshot, but you can sort of see spring out there, off in the distance. I feel a shift beginning, where I can recognize that while I’ve had some low points this winter in terms of my mental health, I can also give myself credit for the on-going process of getting through my first lakeside winter.

Sometimes you need to write about loneliness or grief or the failures so necessary for growth in order to explain it all to yourself. Concepts like loneliness become transmuted into something solid, into a noun, into a thing to be turned over in your hands like a stone worn smooth by water, instead of a verb that scrapes across your heart and leaves it feeling like a skinned knee.

I feel as though I’m losing a little of the hollow feeling that has plagued me on and off over the years. It used to be that I believed myself less hollow when I was in a relationship. But after I had a long stretch of solitude/solo-ness/single-hood [I don’t know which nomenclature I prefer] and the hollowness began to fill in, I thought, don’t ever lose this, don’t ever forget how full you can feel on your own. I hadn’t known truly, up until that point, that it was possible.

[When I did meet someone new, I was fearful of losing what I’d gained. I think part of me fought the relationship the whole time, and part of me fought for it because it did have many good qualities. I talked about the struggle with him, not wanting to fight this war alone. But I suppose once the other person knows there’s a war they don’t feel much like fighting with you, or for you.]

So now I’m in the process of filling the hollow back in with the marrow of my own living. It looks like beach sand in my pockets, driftwood and rocks all over the house, clay beneath my fingernails, notebooks with random thoughts and little poems. Sometimes, too, it looks like loneliness clutched to my chest, a ruined lump of clay I couldn’t center, a dog struggling with his own anxiety despite my efforts to help. But, weather shifts. Atmospheric patterns change. It’s true that some griefs don’t ever truly abate, and a little part of our heart might always be stormy, but a heart is a great big world and the clouds can clear in other territories within it. It’s just hard to be patient with the process sometimes, especially in winter. But there’s no shame in any of it.

Be well. Be patient.

Love, Cath

On Low Points, Letting Go, and Leaping

By Catherine DiMercurio

This year was not my best in terms of writing output. Too many BIG things happened, things that consumed my energy, the way whales swallow krill. Family medical issues, a break-up, selling a house, buying a house, and moving across the state, alone. And a kiddo starting grad school, which though more an event in their life than mine, was something I wanted to be present for to a greater degree than I was able to be.

Still, I managed to write a couple of small things, do some revising, and I’m ending the year submitting short new pieces, along with longer, older ones that have not yet found a home. I have pieces out at journals and small presses in the poetry, creative nonfiction, short story, novel, and short story collection categories. Not bad for a slow year. I’m eager to see what 2026 will bring, and like any writer, I’m hoping for some acceptances.

But more than anything, I’m eager to get back to creating. I’m on the waitlist at a pottery studio and I’m so missing the wheel, the feel of clay beneath my hands. I’m excited to delve back into ongoing writing projects and begin some new ones.

This year was not without other creative efforts, though. Turning a house that was someone else’s, and then vacant for two years, into my own home took a lot of creative energy. I’m loving the way things have come together in this small space. It has the cozy cottage vibe I hoped for. And I haven’t even started on the yard yet. So much fun—and hard work—ahead. It’s the type of hard work that feels especially good, digging in the dirt, creating something beautiful. Maybe I will finally plant a vegetable garden again after so many years of not being able to do so.

In many ways, this has been a year of letting go. I had a low, low point this year. I didn’t know if I was going to proceed with my plan to move toward the lake, and there were many things happening that made me feel frightened for myself and for people I love. In that moment, I turned to someone whom I thought had my back. I poured out my heart, overwhelmed and full of uncertainty. That person’s reply to me was brief, a single line of text saying that I’d get through it. It was the last thing I hoped for or expected to hear. I hadn’t felt so alone in a long time. I thought there would be a sentiment of being in it together, an offer of support, a show of love. At the time, I didn’t know how I’d get through it, and I just wanted to know I wasn’t going to have to figure it all out on my own. Again. Still. You get exhausted from doing that sometimes; I was. But they seemed to be telling me that alone was precisely what I was in for. Sometimes people are (intentionally or otherwise) clear about what it is they can and can’t offer.

I had to let go of a lot of expectations this year. They’re not that useful, as it turns out, expectations. I learned over the years that there is a line between how much you need and how much others think you should need, or how much they are okay with being needed. It’s a blurry line and it shifts and you don’t know when you’ve crossed it until people sort of pull away. You can’t begrudge them this; everyone has their own energy and resources to protect. There’s not a lot of communication about it though, so you’re left a bit fuzzy about the state of your relationships, romantic or otherwise. And then you stop asking for help because you realize that there is a mismatch between what is offered and what you need, so to protect the relationships that you have left, you do what you can on your own and try to tame the needs that go unmet. Tuck them away. Try to silence the voice in your head that shames you for needing too much, for not understanding what “too much” means.

We’re humans; our evolution as a species involves community as well as self-reliance. But the balance is always tough to achieve. Some people are drowning in the micro-communities of their own households. Or they feel like the krill, and their world is a whale. So many married people have confessed to me that they long for solitude more than anything else; they tell me how much they envy me. I cherish my solitude, and I’m attuned to the gifts it offers. As happy and satisfied as I often am, it doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes miss having my own micro-community larger than me and my canine housemate. But as I sit here in the cozy little house that I have created a home out of, and as I look at all I’ve managed to accomplish on my own, I know I’ve made good decisions.

Following that lowest of low moments earlier this year, I had little confidence in my decision-making abilities. It’s taken me many years to have any surety that I could trust my gut again. And in that moment, I struggled to make out what my gut was telling me. Luckily, I had some truly supportive voices that were able to amplify my own instinct to leap into the big new thing that I imagined for myself: life near the lake. My children and a few key family members and friends reminded me of the reasons why I had hatched the plan to move near Lake Michigan in the first place. They kept me going in ways they probably don’t even realize. And once I had been reminded, never wanting to forget about the importance of this leap again, I commemorated the decision with the leaping rabbit tattooed on my arm.

I feel as though it has taken me half a year to even start processing the spring break-up, not to mention everything else that happened. I’m grateful for the luxury of this downtime between Christmas and New Year’s Day, where I can write, paint, work on a puzzle, bake, rearrange furniture, exercise, look at the lake, and simply sit with a cup of coffee and think, feel. I can hurt and cry, laugh and dance, and watch my dog watching me figure myself out all over again. I am thankful for the constant he is in my life; a solid, loving, loyal soul who lets me be whomever I need to be, need however much I need to need.

And I’m thankful that each new day offers us all the chance to take leaps large and small, to trust our gut, to reinvent our lives, completely or incrementally at whatever pace feels good. In my case, that reinvention was about me meeting my own greatest need: to create the space and the conditions necessary so that the person I’ve always been has the room she needs to fully exist, to grow and thrive. Any creative effort is a leap into some unknown, and things usually don’t turn out the way you expect. Sometimes they’re even better.

May all your leaps be lucky.

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

By Catherine DiMercurio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, Cath