Little N and I have been suffering a terrible cold. It's brutal - coughing up crud, oozing goo out the nose, headache and body aches, firey throat... But let me tell you, I like being sick.  Not the sickness part of it so much, but the permission to rest, to detach from the haste and obligations of daily life, to watch the light make its way around our rooms until darkness settles in.  The time and space to just be.

That is how we recover from illness - sleep and fluids.  It's one way that I recover from life.  A little respite from the requirements.  A little grace for something more real.

The dissonance is a kind of pressure on me.  What is real to me versus what is required.  The requirements get so much more time, attention, and money, than what is real.  And the pressure makes me so very tired.  It's hard to think, hard to make decisions, hard to create anything, to connect with people, hard to find any inspiration.  

My younger self, even up to a couple of years ago, rarely got sick but often took mental health days.  I would just get so fatigued... I'd check out for a day or a long weekend, recover myself, and return to work.  But since starting this job I've seen my sick days increase - to include actual illness.  I try to manage it pretty closely so that I'm not penalized for my days off, but between "reactivated mono" last year and this terrible cold this year, my data points aren't looking very good.  I care and I don't.  Because I know that I need the job to pay for my life.  Because the job is so stinking meaningless and gets in the way of what is meaningful to me. 

Meaningful is friendship, care-giving and care-receiving.  It's creating.  It's movement. Thinking.  Reading.  Sharing ideas, time, creations. Autonomy.  Interaction.  And in my current configuration of job, commute, parenting, money... I don't get to meaningful as often as I seem to want to... need to.  I suspect that if my job offered more meaning, or if my daily routine offered more time for what is meaningful to me, my body would be healthier, my immune system stronger.  

So I get sick.

Of course, sickness isn't actually a solution to the problems of meaning.  When I'm sick I can't actually do the things that are meaningful to me.  Sickness is a limbo space.  Where I float between rote obligation and meaningful connection.  Where I rest and regain the energy and perspective to continue to live in the tension between what affords my life and the little bit of life that I get to live genuinely.  

​Weekly sessions with my new counselor harmonized with the naturopath's voice in my head.  My counselor calls it, "a life worth living."  It's a concept I've been toying with for years.  I even own a book titled Creating a Life Worth Living.  I've been moving this book into every new apartment, setting it on the shelf, staring at the title, and not reading it.  I so want a life worth living.  I haven't any faith that I can have it nor imagination of what it looks like.

Until, maybe, now.

When my counselor talks about a "life worth living" he's referring to a life that embodies my values.  He points to "self-validating" actions that make me feel good just for doing something that embodies or reinforces one of my values.  Then he requires that I get concrete in my answers as to what those values and actions are.

For example, I was recently diagnosed with "metabolic syndrome."  It's the All-American coexistence of truncal obesity, high cholesterol, borderline high blood pressure, and pre-diabetic levels of blood sugar.  I'm a stroke waiting to happen.  It's discouraging.  But! I value health, vitality, active longevity.  So!  I commit to and practice the new habits that align my body with my value.  That means taking on some challenging and occasionally boring new behaviors that I don't always (or maybe ever) feel like doing.  In fact, right now, at the starting point, they feel like more work and not like the lounge-y self-care of my daydreams.

Fortunately, I have a smart, supportive care team - the naturopath, the counselor, a nutritionist, and even my son and my ex-husband.  Together, these folks provide me with the information, accountability, and motivation to get my actions in line with my value.  With their help, I'm exercising to a sweaty degree, refining my diet to cut sugar and increase fiber and nutrition, drinking gallons of water, and generally incorporating daily habits that demonstrate and embody the value of my health.

Today, it's a heavy lift.  Change is hard.  Change that requires me to plan and adopt new activities within my limited schedule - feels impossible.  I'm already worn out, how can I possibly be expected to plan meals, cook new recipes, log a food diary, work out... and not reward/appease myself with sweet treats and vegging out!  How can I truly care for myself and inhabit a life worth living if I don't make these changes?  I dust off my calendar and find the time to take care of myself in new ways.  I practice mindful breathing during my bus commute.  I prepare and pack healthy meals to eat at the office.  I pull on my gym clothes as soon as I get home and start moving along to the work-out video that makes me sweat heavily and laugh at myself, too.  

Change isn't just repopulating my schedule with healthy activities.  It's also reassigning value to different things in my mind.  What's a sweet treat in the post-sugar lifestyle?  What's relaxing after raising my heart rate to a beet-red-face level?  These are new delights to discover and enjoy.  Even the idea of work as self-care is a new idea for me to unpack and understand.  And that illuminates other areas of my life and other values I say are important to me: creativity and play, connection and compassion, community and service...

I still love the feeling of being held in a gently swaying hammock.  Maybe in six months (or two years...) I'll love the feeling of a hot work-out after a day at the office.  For now, I'm clumsily, reluctantly, grateful to my care providers for the gift of a new-to-me way of doing self-care.   

​​"Hold your heart in all tenderness.  Something healing this way comes." 
​ - Jen Lemen

​

These words have been on my heart a lot lately.  Because they are beautiful and hopeful.  Because there's so much that needs healing - in my body and my heart, in the bodies and hearts of people I care about, in this country, in the world...

​To me, these words are an invitation to be softer, compassionate, unguarded and vulnerable.  Open to pain, my own and others'.  Faithful to myself and others in the midst of severe trials.  To accept hope and healing, to believe that it is coming. To carry hope and healing into my relationships.  To be one who bears hope and tends others as they heal. 

It's been a long time since I've felt myself to be an open, compassionate person.  Post partum depression and the end of my marriage rendered me harder, less emotional, disconnected from other people and myself.  The last couple of years, and moving forward, have been about my healing in terms of reconnecting and re-membering myself to those parts and practices and tending their life and expression. Lately, I find myself invited to engage with others, beloved friends, with depth of feeling and healing presence.  These invitations challenge me to be the best version of who I am today and to keep growing into someone tender, attentive, and tending.

​My dear friend's health crisis is one of the invitations I'm accepting right now.  Losing faith in those dark hours last week is probably what rose this quote to my mind.  It reminded me of how to show up and who to be when life is so very hard.  It reminded me of who I am.

​I resumed treatment with the Kind Naturopaths several months ago and I just received back some lab work on my blood.  It’s not good.  I’m nearly diabetic and have ridiculously high cholesterol.  Like, one of the categories could not be calculated it was so high.  That news, through the lens of my family’s history (Dad losing his fight with heart disease at the age of 44), felt like a death sentence.  My mortality jeering in my face, demanding that I respond.

I’ve been struggling with making changes to my eating and physical movement habits for a few years.  A one baby-step forward, two giant-steps back kind of struggle.  I’m an emotional eater who comforts herself with food and lounging on the couch or buried under my covers in bed.  And while I’m getting better at feeling my feels it’s not happening quickly enough for my physical health.  

I expect that lots of American women are in this place.  Life is hard and I don’t imagine that I’m so unique.  But the numbers tell me that I’d better get unique when it comes to making big changes for my whole health, my whole life.  My son’s life with his mother.

It’s a lot terrifying and a little bit exciting to take this on like a challenge.  My body wants me to win.  It’s giving me information that says, “Tend me and here’s how...”   I’ve collected enough data to form a response.  It will be a creative, mixed media type of piece applying body, mind, and heart.

Here are some of the ways that I’m working with my whole life to heal my body:

• Strict diet that excludes dairy and simple carbs and emphasizes fiber, protein, and produce
• Stretching, walking… before long I’m adding aerobics, yoga, and hiking to my movement choices
• Lots. Of. Water. 
• Journalling to clarify my thoughts and feel my feelings rather than devour and numb them
• Making stuff, from coloring pages to book binding, creativity energizes me and makes life feel full
• Savoring non-food treats like fresh flowers and comfy shoes

That’s where I’m at today.  There are more good things to add to this list but I need to be gentle and realistic.  A long list feels overwhelming and exhausting to me right now.  The list is part of remembering myself, putting myself back together, with the good stuff that’s nurtured and engaged me in the past.  

In this way, my blood is reminding me who I am and how I want to live.  It’s a good message via a hard medium.  And it’s got my full attention.  

A few weeks ago I finally settled on the idea and accepted that there is no unifying meaning to be made of life the way it is. The lessons of my childhood and a spiritual walkabout through Neo-Paganism and Wannabe Buddhism all fell away with a clattering clumsiness confirming their unreliability. This very prospect of accepting the emptiness had followed me for years, threatening to unravel my tenuous and tentative commitment to life. And in this moment of acceptance it called to me again, with a bellowing vow to suck me into a void where nothing really mattered. Where I and my love, my Little N, didn’t matter. But I held my ground. 

Sitting cross-legged on the bed in my bright little room, I spoke softly to the emptiness inside of me. "You can stay with me. I'm not running from you anymore. And you can speak with me. I'm not afraid of your noise and words. I understand you a little better, now, and you are precious to me." 

The emptiness is valuable. It reminds me of my agency. I can choose how and what I assign meaning to.  Like some sort of spiritual anarchist, I'm declining and refuting the religious law and order that defined how I became who I am.  I retain a hermeneutic of love, grace, and justice as my lens on life, but I reject the prescribed social order and the shoulds of personal piety, of judging our neighbors, of accepting and yielding to an unjust social, political, and economic status quo. 

There’s no inherent meaning, for me, no obvious goodness or rightness, to the way Western society is ordered. It’s not God’s Law that we live in heterosexual legally married nuclear families, that we prioritize private wealth and comfort, that we amplify a narrow view of individual morality over a broader view of public health, economic and environmental sustainability, justice for the marginalized and the poor, that we define those in need as “deserving” and “undeserving” of aid and support… It goes on.  It’s all been better said and sometimes solved by folks wiser, more experienced, more effective than me.  But it bothers me.  And the religion of my upbringing hasn’t helped any of it get better.

The same critique applies to my personal life. There’s no inherent meaning in my marriage and divorce. It doesn’t mean anything that my ex-husband, L, now lives with me and Little N as a roommate and my partner in parenting. I assign no value nor criticism to my leaving home and my birth family to pursue my education and plant myself in a new place with new people in my life. There’s no particular meaning to rejecting the religion and politics I come from. There’s no particular meaning to my current financial struggles and career anxiety. These things just are, and I get to choose what sense to make of them. 

It’s easy to wax on about the big bad world out there. And it’s easy to hunker down into my tiny personal world. The common theme in both scenarios is my choice. The ordained law and order is an illusion. It’s refutable. It’s synthetic. I can and must choose something true in order to keep going in my life. 

The search for something true sends me right back to the prophets and good teachers who have walked this path before. I’m thinking of guides like Buddha, Jesus, and even today’s pagan teacher Starhawk. Their words, lives, and choices, illuminate true things for me about non-attachment to stuff, people, and notions, drawing in the marginalized, supporting the weak and the poor, heeding, tending and defending our home planet. 

In some ways it would be easier to yield to the illusion and accept the myth of a divine law and order that structures our public and personal lives giving us meaning and righteousness. But that doesn’t ring true for me and my life. It doesn’t fill the emptiness and it never has. 

I've been away from this space for well over a year. It's been a full and challenging time. So much learning.

 Old memories are rising - both painful recollections and wise encouragements from my past. The memories point to how I got here. Intimating the sources of deeply held beliefs. Recalling me to nurturing habits I once held sacred and practiced regularly. If I resume those old good habits they could carry me into and beyond this new phase of learning. 

Back in November, I posted that Samhain to Imbolc would be a season of sitting still with the life that I live.  Oh, but I am a wriggly little worm.  Much of this dark season has been resisting the life that I live. So mundane. So uninspired. I've been looking ahead to a season of action on resolutions.