Tag: solstice

On Wishes and Finding Our Way

By Catherine DiMercurio

We are here again, edging our way toward the end of another year, bracing ourselves for whatever is next and trying to inch forward in our own lives, no matter what’s next.

I’m still in the habit of trying to solve my own future, solve for x, study each element of the equation as if some part of me truly believes there is a right answer to find. I do believe we are very much comprised of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. But sometimes experiences knock us around, begin to shape those stories, and we have to spend years trying to unbelieve words that have written themselves onto our hearts.

I tell myself stories about belonging because it often seems that I find myself living in places I don’t feel connected to. In truth though, everything ebbs and flows, and discontent arises when I don’t feel connected to myself, and for me it is also true that this disconnect happens less often and less intensely when I’m in natural spaces—near woods and water. And so I keep trying to connect those dots, find the path to where I am supposed to be.   

Today is the solstice and I have been writing different versions of this essay for weeks. The words have had a tough time finding their way because I have plans in the works that I want to talk about but I also feel it is premature to talk about all that, so I keep writing around it all, even though it impacts no one whether I say this or that. What I want to tell you is that I’m trying to move again but I also don’t want to say it out loud in case something gets in the way and my plans are thwarted. I don’t want to jinx it, but I also want to make it real, call it into being. Saying I’m trying to move near Lake Michigan feels like a bold statement but being vague is confusing, and since this is one of the biggest things tumbling around my head and impacting my life, it is hard to say nothing at all. It is hard to write about anything else. When your heart’s on your sleeve, it’s impossible to play things close to the vest. And it is the solstice which is a magic day and therefore good for wishing.

Because of this trying to move, this deciding, this moving toward a lifelong goal, I am making other decisions, like take a break from pottery, which feels uncomfortable and necessary and like there will be a gap, a big place where something is supposed to be, like when you lose your first molar as a child. How is it gone, and don’t I need that, and how long will it take for something to take its place? My ceramics journey is far from over but there are times when we need to pause. I tell myself it is an artist’s decision, to move toward inspiration and peace and wildness and curiosity, and even though it means saying goodbye to one place, one community, I will find another and art often thrives in such curious and tumultuous circumstances. But I left the studio in tears the night of my last class. I don’t know the last time I was more grateful that I had pushed myself into something new, into that first pottery workshop I did with my kiddo.

While the point of pausing pottery is to focus on getting my house ready to sell, the pause might also be a good opportunity to embrace some writing projects that have stalled a little. But it is also a good time to remember that we can only do so much. We can’t underestimate the toll of the full-time job, especially when it asks more of us than ever before. We have to hold so many conflicting notions in our heads at the same time—being grateful for meaningful work and a paycheck but also feeling that work often leaves us little time or energy to enjoy the rest of our lives, to pursue our other dreams. Sometimes I start out by focusing on gratitude but then find myself down a rabbit hole where gratitude is muddied by things that ought not to be the way they are, where corporate greed impacts so much of our lives, and so on. I am working on finally building a meditation practice that will hopefully keep me away from rabbit holes for a few minutes every morning. Which is not to say that there are issues in this world that we should look away from. Gratitude for what we have should not blind us to what we need to bear witness to.

Still, it is a beautiful, cold morning here and I am lucky and grateful for it. Zero and I spent some time outside at sunrise, while the gibbous moon still shone above us. I feel as though I have more questions than answers at this point in my life and I am always looking for signs and guidance, am always wanting to know if I’m on the path I should be on. While standing out there in the cold at dawn, I stomped my slippered feet lightly on the worn pavers to stay warm, and Zero snuffled around in the frozen grass, and I lit a little candle and did my wishing. It reminded me of the kind of early morning where you might find a lamppost shining in the woods, as if we could be so lucky to find any kind of sign that was so obvious. It was a silly thing to want, yes, but it didn’t stop me from wanting it. If someone else said any of this to me, I would reassure them that the path they are on is the right one by virtue of them being on it. We will get to where we need to go, one way or another, and learn what we need to even if we veer in a direction that later seems “wrong.”

Photo by Boys in Bristol Photography on Pexels.com

Maybe one day I will accept my own answer, that it is okay to make wrong decisions, and it is more important that I am approaching life with curiosity and openness and love than it is to worry about doing something that might hurt me or cost me in some way later on, so much so that I stay frozen. This approach treats inaction as if it is some kind of protection. “Bad” choices and situations are going to happen, even when we’re trying to do everything right, because there is way too much we can’t control. I think once you go through a few such things and feel tired of the consequences, the hurt, you get to a place where you just don’t want to choose anything. It’s okay to move slowly, choose our next step with care but it is an illusion to think staying still makes us invisible to the world and to the challenges it wants to throw our way. Still, we are allowed to rest, and take our time.

Maybe too we can be lanterns for one another, glowing lampposts in the winter woods, helping if not to guide one another, at least to show each other that we’re not alone in our wandering.

Wishing you peace,

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.

Photo by Diego Madrigal on Pexels.com

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