Self-Portrait: when your insides and outsides match

...in turmoil and in calm

What would it take for you to know your self-inherence? To know what needs to be birthed through you and to accept it even if you fear it…and birth it anyway. Like in childbirth, when the uterus is pushing in full, fierce, contractive exodus, seemingly on its own. When what has been created, grown, and cared for is almost through and in the world, and people will soon look it in the eye as its own being. I’ll never forget that experience with my first child, thinking: it’s not all mine any longer. Was it ever?

This is the feeling of being almost done with the writing of a book, especially one which you have spent years molding and remolding until you can’t see it any other way. Especially one that you resist because it requires you to share things about yourself that you’ve spent your life keeping private and safe. Yet it calls you, wants you to be unsafe. Beckons you to reveal more and more with each revision, as if it has caught you hiding. Irresponsibly, and shame on you. Like your hiding is actually hurting people. But what if it hurts you to come out of hiding? Is a writer beholden to an unsafe world? When is it necessary to have your inner terrain step into outer terrain?

These are my questions as I prepare to return my last revisions to my editor for my book, THE WILD WHY: stories and teachings to uncover your wonder. No turning back now. I don’t know of a writer who isn’t scared in this stage of book birthing. Many of my books have scared me and as a result, there are many which I have decided are better left in boxes as personal exercises in learning. But some books won’t leave you alone— they want to be in the world. They stop caring about you and start caring about themselves.

This book scares me more than any book I have published. And it wasn’t meant to. I was so hungry for it in its genesis. I delighted in it all through the writing of draft one. It’s a book about wonder, after all. Returning to your childhood wonder. Letting go of all the things the world asked you to be and that you said yes to. Until it ran you ragged and you learned to say no. And how did you arrive at that no? By allowing the child in you to be your guide. To return to that free zone which is your awe. Something you were born with but were dangerously close to losing as the world carved away at you.

But I didn’t lose it. And I know some things about how wonder saved me from those soul-crushing yes’s. Publicly, the book is about exactly that. It was always meant to be a public book. I wrote it for the reader and shared examples from my life as a way to demonstrate my knowledge and experience on this subject of wonder as essential to well-being. I chose to expose myself as a prototype. An offering, of sorts. That’s all. Easy enough, I thought. I mean, what’s so dangerous about exposing your wonder-full and wonder-less stories? Especially if they help people uncover their own? I’m a teacher, after all. A writer with a teaching spirit who leads writing retreats.

So why do I want to hide right now?

You forget this feeling, like some people forget labor pains. You finish and you want more and you go back and get lost again in what wants to be born through you. It takes years and you live in those years lost to the external world, without entirely knowing it. Because you still pay your bills. And buy bread. And get honked at when you forget for a moment that you are behind the wheel, and fall back into the lostness of your art. It won’t entirely let you go. It doesn’t really want you to buy bread when you can make it. It doesn’t really want you to drive when you can walk. It doesn’t really want you to pay your bills because it knows that you could survive in the woods. It’s that feral. Are you?

I can tell you this: the very first moment a reader tells me that this book helps them, this feeling will go away. So I guess it’s that fickle, this outing. This non-hiding. This claiming. This allowing. This getting out of the way of what art wants to be. Because it’s not a dramatic concept. Or maybe it is. Either way, it’s truth, and every real artist knows this, whether or not they want to know it. No one reminds them. It’s just all the voices and feelings duking it out. Lucky for me, I know how to duck under them when I’m writing. It’s this part that is so dangerous.

Yesterday, I couldn’t take it. My muscles were twitching and my face was numb and my hands were cramping and I was hiding in my bed holding my breath, and I was not okay. I thought it made sense to go hear live music. Hear other people and their art. The musician is a friend of mine. There’s a pivotal chapter in my book where he takes me into the woods and shows me about how to re-find my wonder. He is important to me in this way and he knows it. He came up to me during his break and looked into my eyes. “Uh oh,” he said.

“I’m not okay,” I said.

“You need to go into the woods.”

“Yes. Tomorrow. With you.”

“Yes.” It was more than generous. Giving his Sunday to me like that. He saw something he recognized, I suspect.

Part of this was that my mother had gone unresponsive in front of me in her suburban Chicago Skilled Nursing facility the week prior, and we thought we’d lost her. Then she came to and wanted to get her hair done. Then she couldn’t walk. Then she wanted to put on a party dress for my daughter’s wedding— a wedding she’s living for. Literally. Yet with a miniscule chance of actually being able to go. Not after that. It was the saddest and most powerless I’ve felt in a long time, looking at her so pretty in her blue silk dress. All dressed up with nowhere to go, by definition. And yet…I had to return to my Montana life, wedding ensuing, and leave her to what was left of her own. Couple looking my mother’s death in the face in conjunction with birthing perhaps the most important book I’ve ever written, both of which scare me beyond words…it was too much to handle back home, hiding in my bed. Which is what I’d been doing before I came to hear him sing.

We met at the river along a cottonwood forest. He wanted to cross the river by climbing a jagged, steep tree snag. I told him that I would fall.

“Even with a stick?”

“Yeah. Even with a stick. I’m very wobbly. I’ll take off my boots and socks and wade across. I want to feel the cold water and the smooth stones anyway.” The opposite of a Skilled Nursing facility where people are more soul than flesh, getting ready to make their exodus.

I crossed the river, feeling the stones massaging my feet, the glacial water around my shins, holding me earthward. He sat on the log. I stood in the river and the words came out and wouldn’t stop. He watched me, knowing I’d get somewhere, but I didn’t have much faith in that regard. Sometimes when you know someone knows something about where you’ll land, it’s easier to fall.

I told him all about my mother’s brush with death. Rushing to find nurses. The Power of Attorney and DNR decisions at hand. Standing in the corner while they brought in the machines and hooked her up and said the numbers “911.” Helpless. But that wasn’t the story I was there to tell, and I knew it. “And I feel so so horrible that I had to tell her that she can’t come to my daughter’s wedding at lunch the next day. It’s just not safe for her out here with so much unstable ground, and the hospital far away. She doesn’t realize how weak she is. She’s so crushed. It all just breaks my heart.”

He stared up at me, reading me like the book that has yet to see the light of day. “That’s a lot.”

“Yeah. But there’s something else and it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really make a person a sympathetic character. That’s what I think has me by the throat most of all. Or maybe it’s just all of it happening all at once: book, mother, wedding. Birth. Death. Love. A perfect trifecta, really.”

He waited and watched.

I started crying then. The truth, inconvenient as it felt, spilled. “I think that what’s really going on is that I’m scared of this book I’ve written. I thought it was a teaching book about wonder with some simple examples from my life. But I think it’s about more than that. It feels like it’s a book about childhood wounding when it comes to self-expression. Being hurt for the way I express myself. And then learning to hide in my writing. And that’s not what I want it to be about. I do not want this book to be an outing of my oldest wound. But I don’t know how to write about wonder without talking about what tried to take it away. My very last deadline is next week, and it’s already at the copy-editing stage. Content is locked and loaded. I hope it isn’t lethal.”

He nodded and listened but more and more he was looking upward, over my shoulder.

I turned around.

The sky was the color of a Midwest thunderstorm. The steely gray sort that looks like a giant gargoyle is about to reach out of the cloud and grab you into it and you’ll be lost forever.

I looked at him and said, “Holy shit! We should try to get back to the truck! Shall we make a run for it?”

But his eyes widened the way they do when he knows “a walk in the woods” is going to deliver. And just then there was a lightning strike and a thunder bolt all at once. We both screamed but laughed and said, “We’re in it now!”

He said, “I know where there are some tarps from an old hobo community that used to camp out here.”

Of course he did.

He ran into the cottonwoods. “We want to be about 30 feet apart.”

I didn’t ask why. I’m sure something about how lightning conducts itself.

“And in the trees.”

He pulled back some old logs and unearthed a pile of tarps and threw me one. And he walked about 30 feet from me and crouched with the tarp like a cave around him. I did the same.

“What now?” I hollered through the pelting rain.

“Don’t get wet!” Not a modicum of fear or emergency in his voice. He lives for this sort of natural force that can’t help but make everything else go away.

The rain stabbed at the tarp, lightning all around us, thunder rolling through the now black skies. I crouched until my knees couldn’t take it and then I just sat on the wet forest floor. In that moment, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be. I wasn’t scared. I’d been so scared. This was the deafening cleanse I didn’t know I needed.

So I starting howling, and he did too, and I could see his white, smiling eyes through the small slit in his tarp. How could we have missed the storm coming? How hadn’t I felt the temperature drop? How had he sat on that log and just watched it come in? Was it because he knew that my inner terrain needed to be washed by the outer terrain? This exact outer terrain?

And in that unafraid hour of my wobbly recent life, I felt whole. Inside and out, merged and one.

When the rain slowed to a patter, I was sad. I knew that I would go back into fracture again. Couldn’t I stay this way forever? Like just after birth when you hold your child in your arms taking its first breaths of this exterior world? Inside and outside merged in the magic of wholeness? The physical and the metaphysical, one? I doubted it. But when my friend emerged from his tarp cave with his giant smile, I stayed in my cave for just a moment more.

To memorize it. For later. When the dark clouds would hover and the sky would rattle and shake and send fire from ground, back skyward. And when the rain would come. And I would know how to find a tarp in the woods. All on my own. And I would hide and not be afraid. And feel whole.

You can hide. But if it’s for protection that’s one thing. If it’s for fear…that’s entirely another. And I don’t want that for myself anymore. And I don’t want that for you.

Writing Exercise to follow for paid subscribers:

Still a few spots left on the October 30-November 3 Haven Writing Retreat in Montana!

Go here for more information and to set up an introductory call with Laura to see if Haven is right for you. You do not have to be a writer to come to Haven. Just a word-wanderer. A person who longs to find their voice. A seeker who needs to step into their next chapter with writing as a potent guide. And if you are a writer, you will walk away with an even richer relationship with your muse, your practice, and any project you are working on or want to develop in any genre.

Write a scene in which your internal terrain matches the external terrain, and allow the external terrain to heal something inside you.

It can be something that has actually happened to you, or a fictionalized event that you imagine. Bring the inner and outer terrain into an equal dance of feeling and passion play. Include some dialogue and thoughts/feelings. Use high stakes.

You can write it in the present tense so that it’s alive, or try it in the past tense as I did here and see if you can still put the scene to work with limited reporting. Bring in as much sensory detail as possible in both the physical world and your physical being, inside and out. In my piece, I wrote about scene snippets. In yours, try to devote the piece to one stretched scene.

No more than 2500 words.

May it move you and even heal you.

Yours,

Laura