2020 was a bad year for the trees in my life.
I know: it was a horrible year for everyone, filled with death and chronic illness and devastating poverty and, for those of us fortunate enough to escape all of the above, the fear and isolation that come from living through a deadly plague.
But right now, I want to talk about our trees.
Continue readingIn a novel I recently read, a character’s hands were perpetually clenched. She wasn’t looking for a fistfight. She was steeling herself for the next struggle that her hard, sad, painful life would bring.
For me, it’s not the hands that clench involuntarily. It’s my jaw, my neck, my shoulders, my glutes, my legs.
“Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” Mary Oliver writes in “Wild Geese,” the poem that inspired me to quit my job, start this blog, and try to live Oliver’s advice. Mostly I have understood that advice metaphorically: giving myself permission to do what makes me feel whole and happy, and not to make the to-do list — or worrying about the to-do list — my main focus.
Lately I am also thinking about the literal, physical animal of my body. It is not a soft animal. (Unless we’re talking about flab.) Deconditioned though I am after years of chronic illness, many of my muscles are not soft. They are tense, hard, painful. Continue reading
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
I didn’t blog at all for five weeks in September and October. The despair was too thick.
I knew it would happen. Drawing inspiration from the stunning first lines of Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”—the verses at the top of every page of this blog—I am trying to let myself love what I love, to accept myself as I am. But all along, I knew I would eventually arrive at the next, pivotal lines:
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
I’m reading two books: My Grandfather’s Blessings, by Rachel Naomi Remen, and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.
The first is on loan from a friend who (correctly) thought I would like its “stories of strength, refuge, and belonging,” as the subtitle says. The book defines a blessing as a “moment of meeting” and of wholeness—a m
oment when someone or something helps you remember who you are, and when you do that for someone else. The author is a cancer doctor, and she talks a lot about healing.
The Fault in Our Stars is a novel about teenagers with cancer. I borrowed it from my daughter because she recommended it as a well-written and effective tearjerker, and I need to cry. A lot. I’m not yet far enough into it to start crying, but the two books do have me thinking.
The other night I read a scene from The Fault in Our Stars where one teenager says to another: “Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease.”
It’s the end of the summer. Kids are going back to school. Teachers are going back to work.
I’m on a different calendar.
For sure, I am preparing for the Jewish new year, 5776, which begins in less than three weeks (!). But for the first time in 20 years, neither of my daughters is beginning a new year as a student. And I, having quit my job in July, am not heading back to work.
That feels odd. I am beginning to feel stirrings of when-will-this-experiment-in-voluntary-unemployment end, and what-will-I-do-next, and when-will-I-start-making-some-money. These stirrings are unsettling and unwelcome, because they don’t come from my heart or my gut, from a feeling that I’m ready to move onto the next thing. They come from my mind, specifically the voice in my head that tells me I’m not good enough. That in everything I do, I should do more of it, and better. That I am what I do—if I’m doing not much to speak of, then that’s what I am.
I used to have a workout playlist that started with Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” and ended with his “The Promised Land.” Great tunes, driving rhythms, uplifting theme — what better way to start strong and finish strong?
A technical glitch zapped that playlist, along with the rest of the music on my iPod. Some life glitches zapped my workouts, and the Humpty Dumpty playlist is one of the things I have not yet put back together again.
But I’ve been thinking lately about the Badlands-to-Promised Land trajectory and how it so perfectly fits our culture, with its stories of true grit and triumph over adversity. It perfectly fits the trajectory I was trying to follow in my life: the better-stronger-higher-deeper ethos that not only pervades popular culture, but also motivates some of the people I most admire.
It’s a great story line for getting me off my tuchus to exercise. But as a life story, it leaves a lot to be desired.
For this year’s Passover seder, my daughter brought a packet of poems that she related to the themes of the holiday. One of those poems, Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” grabbed hold of my imagination and would not let go.
Throughout the spring, I returned to the poem again and again. It seemed to offer a glimpse of what freedom and redemption could really feel like — a vision that I find both tantalizing and terrifying.
You do not have to be good.
What?! Of course I have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
Hmmm. I do have to trek through the desert, or at least through the wilderness. For the past three years, since my father died, I have been struggling through the rugged terrain of my own psyche: the barren deserts, the forbidding forests, the mountains that I have to either climb, hand over hand, or tunnel beneath. Occasionally there’s an oasis, a clearing, a breathtaking waterfall or a heartbreakingly beautiful rainbow. But overall, it’s been an arduous trek, and one that I make by necessity, because my father’s death shattered the psychological place where I used to live. That world, and the person I used to be, no longer exist.
So I do have to walk through the desert, but I don’t have to walk on my knees. I don’t have to make my journey more strenuous for the sake of penitence and self-correction. I don’t have to — but that’s what I do. Could I really free myself from that self-imposed servitude?
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
This is the refrain I keep coming back to: I only have to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves. That’s all? That’s harder than the first two, harder than anything.
It sounds so appealing, so cozy, like a kitten cuddling in your lap or a dog snoozing gently in the sun. Soft, warm, relaxed, loving what you love, not thinking about anything else.
But what if my soft animal is too soft — too lazy, self-indulgent, self-centered? What if I don’t want to do anything else but lie in the sun? Or what if that animal turns out to be not a docile pet, but a wild animal: aggressive, ruthless, tearing apart the people and the life I love?
Throughout the spring, I struggled to explain to family and friends why I was so struck by this poem, and so stuck on it. I struggled to explain what the soft animal represents, why the notion of letting it love what it loves was so alluring and yet so frightening.
“What does it mean to you?” my therapist asked (one of her favorite questions). Then she nailed it: “It means being yourself.”
That’s exactly right. Letting my soft animal love what it loves means being myself. I do not have to be good all the time. I do not have to walk on my knees. But I do have to find the courage to let other people see me as I really am. And I have to discover for myself who I really am — including the parts I have worked hardest to disguise and ignore.
For 30 years, I did my best to ignore the nagging feeling that I am not good enough. At anything. Ever. In every area of my life that mattered to me, personally and professionally, I fell short of my own expectations. As a spouse and a parent, a daughter and a sibling, a friend and a neighbor: not good enough. My work: not good enough. Physically: not fit enough. Intellectually: not educated enough. Whatever I set out to do, I felt that I should do it better and more.
For years, I submerged these feelings beneath activities designed to make me feel “good enough.” If I pushed myself just a little bit harder, maybe my accomplishments would compensate for my gaping flaws, or at least cover them up. The strategy was partly successful — until my father’s sudden death. Then, I found myself overwhelmed by shock, grief, and this not-good-enough feeling that I could no longer avoid. In the language of the Passover story, this is my Egypt, my land of captivity.
So I’m working to let these feelings surface, to face them head-on, and to find a way through them — through the desert — to the Promised Land of self-acceptance. My father, of blessed memory, was one of the very few people I know who truly, genuinely felt good about himself. He didn’t think he was better than other people. But he thought he was good enough. What better memorial could I establish than to find that same inner peace?
And so was born the idea of the Mary Oliver Challenge: a commitment to letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves. A commitment to figuring out what I want, untangling it from what I think I should want and should do.
I hadn’t been excited about my job in a while. The horizon was distinctly lacking in exciting prospects. But when my incredibly supportive husband suggested that I take some time off, I rejected the idea. I need structure, I told him. I would set wonderful, self-nurturing goals (Go to yoga class every day! Explore my family history! Get back in shape!), fail to accomplish them, and feel worse than ever, I told him.
Then I thought: what if my goal was not to set goals? What if my plan was not to make plans? I might want to do those things eventually. But at the outset, what if I just try to do what I want? Try to discover what I want and how to pursue it even when it scares me, even when my reach exceeds my grasp? What if I accept that this challenge will necessarily involve wasting time — time when I want to be writing a blog post or an essay, or restarting my running practice, but when instead I distract myself from that intensity and my fear of failure by playing solitaire or poking around Facebook? What if I accept that inevitability as part of the process rather than considering it a failure?
I started writing this post in May. It’s now the end of June. I spent most of that time not working on it at all, and the rest tinkering with the few sentences I had already written. Like Penelope in The Odyssey, weaving and unweaving the same piece of fabric, I hoped to postpone the moment of completion and its accompanying moment of decision: do I want to hit “publish” and hang my linens out for the world to see?
I am determined not to let this blog become a “should,” so it might end up as the world’s shortest-lived project. But at this moment, the answer is “yes.”
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
* Mary Oliver does not endorse this blog, which she has probably never heard of.
The Mary Oliver Challenge 