“ When you get quiet inside, the right words come a little easier.” — Maya Angelou

Writing of the Month

Cutting Through the Bullshit

This morning, as I sat in a rocking chair on my shady porch my mind chattering on about how I needed to go to water aerobics, all of a sudden, a moment of awareness sliced through the jumble of thoughts and my mind stopped. I breathed in and felt a gentle breeze caressing my bare arms. Looking up, I saw the cottonwood leaves rustling above me. The sky was peeking through, pale blue with fluffy clouds. Looking down, I saw a lady bug and one of those strange pale bugs that come from cottonwoods dancing on the arm of the other rocking chair. It was a slow dance, as they circled around each other, a wondrous sight.  

            I felt so happy to be there and to have seen them and to know I wasn't alone. In that moment, I could see how I am just one of an infinite number of sentient beings who all believe we are the center of the universe until something wakes us up–– a flicker of light, the cooing of a mourning dove, a leaf fluttering,  bugs dancing.  At any moment there can be a gap in the chatter and there it is––a vast universe all around me, my body alive, my heart beating, my mind no longer taking up all the space.

            Earlier I had been journaling in my bed, as I drank my morning tea. As a prompt, I had asked “What am I afraid of?” It’s a question I circle back to again and again as I am buffeted by waves of anxiety whenever I contemplate my memoir, A Tree with My Name on It and her journey into the world.  Is she being welcomed, are people reading her, do they like her? And then, how can I find other people to read her and will they be kind to her. Even good things––a great review, five stars on Amazon, a friend writing to tell me they love the memoir, can set off another wave of doubt. “Are they just telling me that to make me feel better?”         

            Just this week, I got an email telling me that A Tree with My Name on It is a finalist for a Colorado Authors League Book Award in Memoir. After a day or two of delight at the news, the old engine of doubt and anxiety cranked up and started spewing out an endless stream of negative messages. This morning, the headliner “What if I don’t win?” had stirred up a litany of old familiars, beginning with – “You’re just not good enough” cycling through “Nothing you do is ever the winner” and finally landing on “Why go to the awards ceremony and be humiliated?”

            Then just when I was settling into that cozy space of despair and gloom, a sentence arose in my mind: “I am an old woman who lives in a trailer who wrote a memoir.”

            Out of all the jumble of opinions, judgments, anxious thoughts, labels and negative biases, a simple truth blazed through like a neon sign on a broken-down diner –– I am an old woman who lives in a trailer who wrote a memoir.  Right then, my spirits lifted, throwing off the musty blanket of bullshit I was wrapping myself in.  I felt inexplicably light and at ease, as though the cells in my body were smiling.  I got out of bed, made a bowl of granola sprinkled with pieces of ripe nectarine, went out on the porch and sat on my rocking chair.

            Which brings me back to where I began. As I rocked and fed myself spoonfuls of granola I drifted and soon I was back in the realm of thinking and my thinking mind began telling me I should do something more consequential, something better for me than just sitting doing nothing on my porch, something like exercising.

            Thankfully, as the chatter revved up, my earlier moment of unfabricated truth was still available. I was still an old woman who lives in a trailer who wrote a memoir. And that old woman can do whatever she feels like doing. She doesn’t need to follow the rules of should and should nots. She can sit on her rocking chair and be at ease, awake in a vast unfathomable universe and do nothing for as long as she likes.

Learn more about A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home