Today is Mabon. My calendar informs me it’s my weekend to post on Harvesting Stones. Some weeks I’m all ready to go and need do nothing more than push the publish button. This week these are the first words I’ve written, sitting here on my little porch on Saturday morning watching the clouds tatter before the morning sun.
Mabon, or fall equinox, is the balance point during which the hours of daylight and darkness are equal. It mirrors spring equinox and falls between winter and summer solstice. Fall is my favorite time of year, and this fall I’m in the midst of profound transformation. It’s a harvest season like no other in my life.
Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash
Sometimes we are so swept up in the tides of life and death we can do nothing but keep breathing. Days fall away from me, hours drift by and disappear without my awareness. I am focused on the next task, and the next. At the end of each day, I cross to-dos, questions, concerns off my lists, make notes for the next days and weeks, and fall into bed before rising at 4:30 or 5:00 to begin again.
In the midst of the chaos, I remember I choose my life. I’m getting better at just stopping.
Stopping.
I have before me a weekend. Mabon, 2023. It will never come again. A hundred tasks to do. A hundred things to worry about. A hundred choices to make.
Mabon is about balance. Action balanced with rest. Complexity balanced with simplicity. Fear balanced with confidence. Work balanced with play. Grief balanced with joy.
The light; the growing season; the summer of hospice, anguished love, extra caregivers, demented phone calls, medication lists, and, finally, my mother’s death, wane. Trees retain their leaves, but summer’s fierce green fades, bronzing, drying. Sedum and chrysanthemums bloom in the garden. A few sunflowers still flower among the ripening seed heads of their fellows.
Mabon. Balance. And I, a creature, a life among so many other lives, what can I say about it? How can I talk about balance when it feels so far from reach? How will I find balance again on the other side of transformation?
What I hold are impressions, vivid moments of mindfulness and sensuality, unexpected emotions, and the determination to cling fast to myself as autumn rip tides carry me where they will. For I am here, alive, curious, creative, awed, grateful, terrified.
Photo by Autumn Mott on Unsplash
I’m rereading Susan Fletcher, a favorite author. I just finished Oystercatchers. On the last page, this: “You’re this: an onion bulb. The glint of a rabbit’s eye. The clicking of a beetle’s legs on a leaf; the leaf’s brown edge; dandelions; a pebble; windfall fruit.”
I read no more; I was crying too hard.
My mother is always with me. She has always been with me. My blood, my bone, my sculptor. Now, her death is with me, too, and her dying. Grief has not come to the front door, which I’ve left ajar in anticipation of its coming. It’s crawled through cracked windows, slipped through old screens long-dead cats tore with their claws. It’s drifted down the chimney, come up through gaps in my old wood floor from the cellar, crept along the copper radiator pipes, cool now, but soon to be warming.
I carry bewildered pain within me, like a ripe nut in its shell. How does it happen that a human being, intelligent, talented, competent, with so much to give, can have no feel for life? How can anyone refuse to engage with the mystery, the glory, the terror, the sweetness, and yes, even the pain of what it means to be alive, to love, to be broken and heal over and over?
Isn’t it strange that I find her in the small delights she herself would never have recognized as sustenance, as miracles? Something in Mom was too blind or too broken or perhaps too frightened to allow life to clasp her in its arms. Something. We could never talk about it. I knew it was there, but she would not reveal even the edges of her true experience.
In the end, as the fogs of dementia surrounded her, she was at last able to say she loved me. I have that, at least. And yet, she was demented … But I choose to believe.
Mabon, then, is the autumn garden. Planting blue and white grape hyacinths in drifts with daffodils under the magnolia so in spring they will bloom and naturalize as the seasons come and go. Shoveling and spreading compost mixed with aged cow manure, rich with earthworms and beetles. Pruning, trimming, prying weeds and grass out of cracks in the sidewalk and driveway. Disturbing our small brown toads as I weed and clean up debris in readiness for the blanketing fallen leaves. Dividing and transplanting. Spider webs jeweled with dew. Chilly mornings and gorgeous afternoons. The smell of my catnip, ecstatically trampled and chewed, no doubt discovered by the neighborhood black cat, Winston by name. Planting a few end-of-season sale perennials from our local greenhouse: lavender, black-eyed Susan, sedum. My garden manicure of dirt ground under my fingernails and into my cuticles, always dry and ragged from so much time in the pool. It won’t scrub away, but it will soak off in the pool during my next lesson. Peeling skin and blisters. Bruised knees.
Photo by Dakota Roos on Unsplash
Mabon is the early morning mist rising from the Kennebec River three or four blocks away. It moves up from the surface of the water, along the dark, early-dawn streets and walkways, enveloping the trees, rising to hide the church spire and then gently dissolving as the sun rises while the crows call and the neighborhood rooster announces the dawn.
Mabon is the taste of Apple Pie Chai (Republic of Tea) with a dollop of half n’ half in it, as delicious as it sounds. It’s scented candles burning in the first hours of my day as I journal, make lists, think about the day ahead. Orange, red, and golden candles – orange and spice, apple and cinnamon, sandalwood. One of my closest friends says sandalwood is a “dirty hippy smell.” The thought makes me smile every time I light it. The apples and cinnamon candle sputters companionably because it has a wooden wick (Book&Reverie candles on Etsy).
Mabon is linen sheets dyed a glorious old gold on my bed, textured, heavy, luxurious. It’s socks and sneakers instead of my Keen sandals. It’s my heavy grey shirt jacket with a Buff bandana or a scarf.
Mabon. The Wheel of the Year turns. Seasons and cycles. These things remain. These things are predictable, comforting. They sustain me.
This year, Mabon is also a blizzard of what feels like endless documents, digital, paper, filed away, stacked on my desk, put into binders, stored on USB sticks. Soon, Mom’s house in Colorado will sell, the requisite paperwork will be filed for tax preparers and other legalities. Printing and scanning, FedEx drop offs, notarizing, will eventually be complete. The business of opening accounts with a new bank, obtaining new cards and checks, changing automatic payments and direct deposits, connecting to other accounts, will be finished. Insurance, retirement accounts, paying off debt – all will be managed. I will create new systems, effective and simple.
This week my nearly 20-year-old Subaru failed to pass inspection. I can’t understand it. The driver’s side door handle still works; I don’t really need the others. It drives. I don’t need AC or an audio system. I can manage without being able to open the back hatch. The heat and defrost work if I put in the fuse, and the battery is good as long as I don’t leave the fuse in when I park it. I know exactly where to bring my fist down on the hood when an ice storm seals it shut and I need to open it and put the fuse back in.
It needs $3000 of work. It’s worth $1100.
I need a new car. More tasks. More paperwork. Insurance. Registration.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
These things, the documents, the tasks, the paperwork, phone calls, texts, emails, are nothing but the chrysalis of transformation. I know it. I feel stressed and overwhelmed much of the time, frustrated by delays, miscommunications, jumping through legal and bureaucratic hoops. It’s all temporary, though. It will fall away, along with the autumn leaves. The chrysalis will shred in the dark winds of late autumn and winter, this rip tide will release me, and then … something new.
Through it all is my mother. My memories of her. The pain of my love for her. I’ve inherited so much more from her than assets. There is some comfort, some strange, painful comfort, in remembering to pause. To choose. To stop. To be touched, broken open by the small daily beauties and comforts of life. The taste of creamy tea. The scent of sandalwood. The texture of rich soil. The late copper and garnet blooms of mums. The mist rising into the sun’s golden warmth. Most of all, the painful risk of loving friends, family, the world, life.
Look, Mom. See the little toad? Let’s put him here, under the rhododendron. Remind me to buy toad houses.
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
Or perhaps not becoming, but emerging. I’m reminded of Michelangelo’s quote: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
I’m emerging as someone I was always meant to be.
This emergence began (I know you’ll be shocked) with a book by Pete Walker titled Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. In the pages of this book I found the self I’ve always known and the private experiences I’ve hidden out of guilt, fear, and shame.
I also found a map to a new person.
Although the catalyst was the book, which by its nature is intellectual, the process itself is almost entirely felt. I can’t think myself into a new sense of self and my life; I must feel my way.
This makes it hard to write about here.
As so often happens, a poem came along that perfectly describes what I feel in the subtle, intuitive, symbolic language of poetry rather than carefully crafted, concrete prose.
The Return by Leanne O’Sullivan
I walk through paw-prints the frost has dug, among the moist grasses, my silver hair flowing like a cat’s deep stretch. This is my season. Again and again I die under the blossom of leaves and count my lives by the sapped rings of trees. No one will know me, none but the wood growth, its hug of frost its scent of moss its naked shadow and I, standing at the end of an embered wood where once a light passed through me and passes again, before I remember how I appeared or how I ended, folding myself into my arms — the seed, the root, the blossom, the stone shining with all my running juices.
From Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (Bloodaxe Books, 2009)
Emergence, I discover, is a kind of death, like the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or moth. It’s a process of uncovering, of freeing something hidden inside, somehow familiar but never before seen. The soul and spirit I was meant to be were covered with a stony crust, originally formed for protection, but long ago becoming a prison. A crust of coping mechanisms and beliefs. A crust covering feelings too painful and overwhelming to acknowledge or face when first felt.
As I scrape away that crust, the feelings it covered swell into life, and they do not want my intellect or to be pinned down into a blog post.
They want to be felt.
Photo by Chinh Le Duc on Unsplash
And, having been felt, they dissipate like incense smoke, leaving behind a coating of scented ash that scatters with a single breath and reveals someone I’ve never known or been before.
In the meantime, external life goes on around my internal experience. My car is in the shop. It’s a heavy work week. We are stifling in high humidity. I have just finished editing my second manuscript and am rolling up my sleeves to begin writing the third. I’m working on my new website.
As I live the days, I recognize triggers I wasn’t aware of before, triggers to old feelings and reactions, and I apply new tools, habits, compassion, and understanding to them. I’m grateful for the foundations I’ve already built of mindfulness, creativity, and emotional intelligence. I didn’t know they would become the foundations of a new self.
I am changing. I am emerging. I am learning and growing. I am wondering where I’m going.
Wherever I’m going, it’s better than where I’ve been.
I have a friend at work who, in the moment of an unexpected event, says, “This is happening!” as he copes on the fly. The phrase (and my friend) makes me smile, and it keeps running through my head as our world changes.
Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash
We’re all affected, and we’re all saturated with news, statistics, opinions, thoughts, predictions and our own feelings about current events. We’re all sick of the subject (no pun intended), but it’s hard to talk about anything else.
The headlines are grim. The maps are grim. The future is uncertain. I’m writing this on Saturday, March 15. What will Monday bring? Where will we be on Thursday, when I publish this?
Nobody knows.
Last week I wrote about making choices, and discerning between the places we have power and the places we don’t. It was a timely post.
We can choose to see our current situation as an opportunity.
Before you start throwing rotten food at me, understand I’m in no way minimizing our stress, anxiety, fear or loss. I’m very concerned, more for others than myself, but for myself, too. I don’t want to get sick and die. I haven’t finished my books yet, for one thing.
On the other hand, I admit to a sort of horrified fascination when it feels like everything is falling apart, either for me, personally, or on a larger scale. Chaos, in my experience, is filled with possibility, with sudden shifts and changes, with unexpected twists and outcomes. When we surf the edge of chaos, we’re in terra incognita, and anything might happen.
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We’ve all been hearing about restrictions, limitations, cancellations, curfews, lockdowns, and other draconian measures as the pandemic sweeps across the globe. It’s not a good time to travel, have elective surgery, spend money frivolously, run out of toilet paper, or do a thousand other things.
It is a good time for … what?
I work in a hospital rehab center in a nonessential position. We currently have 30 confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Maine. I suspect there are actually many hundreds of cases by now, but testing is limited up here, so it’s hard to say. The hospital has put protocols in place, and we are now closed to the public and serving rehab patients only. I’m an hourly worker, so if (when) we shut down the rehab center, I won’t get paid.
My partner is at high risk due to his age and health history.
Just like everyone else, I’m anxious about how fast things are happening and what might happen next, and I have the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that says we’re freewheeling, out of control. ‘Normal’ is MIA.
I always have my eye on power dynamics. We could make a long list of everything we can’t control right now, all that’s not in our power.
But what about what we can control? What is in our power? Again, I think of my post last week, and how many of us honestly feel we don’t have time to engage with what matters most to us in our normal lives. But now we’re living not-so-normal lives, and we may spend some time doing that.
Photo by Andrew Loke on Unsplash
In my own life, when it’s all fallen down and I find myself wandering through the rubble, I’ve always found transformation. Pain, grief, tears, terror, yes, all of those. And transformation.
We each have the power to reach out to loved ones. We can’t choose who gets sick or who recovers, but we can communicate with the people we care about heartfully and honestly. It’s easy to lose touch, or interact superficially on social media and call it good. It’s easy to drift apart and become disconnected. Quarantine, isolation and lockdown are opportunities to strengthen connections.
Don’t forget it’s spring. We can choose to enjoy the return of the birds, the lengthening days, the sunshine, and the abundance of new growth and life around us. We can take a walk. We can make it a daily habit.
We have an opportunity to enjoy creativity. Listen to music. Read a book. You have time now, all you TLDR (too long, didn’t read) people! We can forget the toilet paper and buy ourselves a new box of crayons or some finger paints. Here’s our chance to nurture our creativity. If we’re in quarantine or lockdown we have time to play. No more excuses. Creative folks are reaching out to others in all kinds of nontraditional and beautiful ways right now.
Have I mentioned it’s spring? It’s a great time to clean and declutter our homes. Not only can we make daily cleaning of all surfaces we touch easier right now, we can lighten up our lives and homes for the future. Let’s open the windows and let the sun come in. Let’s get rid of the stuff that doesn’t matter. Let’s clean our cars, our phones, our keyboards.
While we’re out walking, we can wave to our neighbors. We can smile. We’re all scared and worried. This is where our power is — with the people around us. We can check up on neighbors. If we’re at less risk than an elderly friend or neighbor, we can offer to run errands for them when we have to go out. We can find a dog to walk. We can practice social distancing and still connect with and care for those around us. We’re all in this together.
We can do ourselves and our immune systems a favor and rest. Relax. Laugh. When was the last time we checked in with ourselves? Are we happy? Are our needs being met? Are we pleased with the shape of our lives? We can take naps, or sleep in. We can exercise, eat good food, drink lots of water. We can challenge an addiction or a time-wasting habit. If not now, when?
When did we last give our intellect a fun thing to do? We could explore something that interests us, learn a new skill, play with critical thinking. We could exercise our brains. We could take on a daunting project we’ve been procrastinating about.
How’s our spiritual life? It’s a great time for prayer, ritual, or to begin a meditation practice. We could create a daily gratitude practice and focus on that instead of fear and anxiety.
Resilience equals survival. Resilient people make conscious choices about how they use their resources, especially in the face of unexpected disaster. We’re faced with a lot of unknowns right now, but let’s not obsess over the unknowable, including the future. Our power lies in our ability to choose in the present moment and let the rest go.
We know how to work, spend money, distract and be busy. Life is about more. Now we have an opportunity to simply be with the moment, with the world as it is, and with ourselves. Let’s remember how to live. Part of living is the necessity to come to terms with death.
Take good care, everybody. Love yourself and your people. Stay with your power and surrender the rest. We’ll get through this.
Pandemic
What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Centre down.
And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love— for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.
I’ve lately been revisiting David Whyte’s work, including one of his audiobooks titled What to Remember When Waking. He suggests having faith in things falling away.
It caught my attention because usually we speak of faith in what we judge to be positive: Courage, kindness and the sun coming out tomorrow. Having faith in the shadow side of life suggests a deeper wisdom.
This coincides with my current personal focus on shame, which I discover (to my chagrin and sorrow) is a burden I carry every day and can’t remember being without. I knew it was there, in the roots of me, but generally speaking I try to hide it and look the other way. I’ve never had any idea how to eliminate it or transform it into something less painful and more effective, so it’s become firmly and almost invisibly established.
Whyte, a magnificent poet, prompted me to think differently about feelings and experiences we typically cast as negatives and try to avoid, ignore, hide or minimize. Have faith in things falling away.
What kind of things fall away?
Leaves in autumn, innocence, comets, people, memories, time, feelings, others beloved by us, and our own lives. Flowers drop their petals. Snakes shed their skins. Seconds and years fall away, one by one. The sea ebbs from the land and then returns. What we can see of the moon wanes and falls away to nothing before it waxes once more. A fertile woman watches each month’s possibility of new life fall away when she is not pregnant. The dark falls away before the light, and the light before the dark. Cell by cell, lash by lash, hair by hair, our bodies fall away during our lifetimes.
Sometimes we fall away from others, or tear ourselves away from jobs, relationships or places.
Some things we are glad to let go and leave behind us. Other losses are so terrible we feel permanently maimed.
Then there are things like shame that are forced upon us by others, that cripple our joy and our ability to love ourselves. We long to be free of such burdens, to let them fall away, but we don’t know how to do it. Even if we find a way to loosen their grip upon us, we are sometimes unwilling to cast them completely aside, because then we would become strangers to ourselves, strangers in our own lives, and we fear that change more than our familiar suffering.
Photo by fancycrave on Unsplash
Faith in things falling away. Trust and confidence, in other words, in both loss (things we don’t want to lose) and relief (things we do want to shed).
Could it be that the way through shame, longing, fear, anguish and the like is to turn toward it, embrace it, kiss it on the mouth? Is that what must happen before it can fall away? I wonder.
Can we trust in the approaching storm as much as we trust in the sun coming out tomorrow? Can we trust in the unraveling, the fraying, the slow decline, the darkest shadows of our hearts and actions, as well as healing, vigorous new life, and our kindness and compassion?
I suppose what I’m really asking is if we can trust in all of our experience and feeling, whether comfortable or agonizing, in any given moment. Can we trust in change and suspend our judgement about whether it’s good or bad? If our world is burning around us and everything we know or have is falling away to ash, can we have faith in the purification of that terrible loss?
Taking it further, am I willing to have faith in my own frustration, anguish, scars and shame? Am I willing to explore these things, talk with them, allow them to teach me, even love them, and then let them go or transform? Do I possess the courage to let an outdated version of myself fall away while I enlarge my soul?
Inevitably, inexorably, things change and fall away. As human beings, how do we choose to live with that fact? Faith or resistance?
Tonight I will sleep with my worries through dreams dark with soil and the heaving cataclysm of the spade turning earth round me not speaking of air or light fused with greenness but of darkness and the first leaves like hands in prayer clasped inside the seed.
I’ve been thinking about this week’s post for a couple of days now. There’s a lot more to say about boundaries than I’ve discussed here and here, and maybe someone else can shape the many complex pieces into separate, coherent posts, but that person isn’t me. I can sort out a few points, but the rest is chaos containing all kinds of inflammable issues, such as parenting, corporal punishment, our justice system, religion, sexuality, morals, ethics, rape culture, racism, entitlement and patriarchy.
There’s no doubt in my mind that these are important discussions and ideas for all of us, but the purpose of this blog is not to have a shouting match or explore the different ways we can criticize, judge and belittle one another.
Photo by Andrew Loke on Unsplash
I suspect most of us agree boundaries are necessary, but after that point I see potential for endless violent disagreement about how and why we create and manage them. I believe it’s safe to say our understanding of boundaries is heavily influenced by our childhood experience, our culture and family, and technology and media.
I have no answers. I notice what I call my boundaries don’t work very well at times. I notice the conflict between what works for me, what others expect, and what I’ve been taught. I notice a generation gap around boundaries. My 20-something sons see the whole issue differently than I do. I think some of this is due to differences in our relationships to technology, but I don’t know how much.
I also notice a lot of my boundaries are around fear. As a single woman, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of being hooked into GPS and map information via technology. It doesn’t feel safe to me. Likewise, I’m uncomfortable discussing my spirituality, my parenting beliefs, my political beliefs, my dietary choices and the color of my underwear. I’m not ashamed of who I am — I’m afraid of being victimized. I don’t want to deal with mean, hateful or dangerous people. I don’t want to attract the attention of a psychopath or a sociopath. I don’t want to lose connections and relationships over something like religion.
Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash
Then there’s the part of me that simply isn’t interested in what I call oversharing. I mind my own business — why can’t everyone else mind theirs?
On the other hand, surely we have a right to be who we really are. But where is the line — the boundary, if you will— between that right and violating someone else’s boundary?
A highly topical example of this is the debate over Native American team names in the public school system. Many Native Americans find this offensive and racist — and say so. The other side hotly denies they’re racist and cites tradition and their intention to honor the Native American people. It’s a ding-dong argument. I’m hurt and offended and this feels racist versus I am not a racist, back and forth, on and on, with both sides becoming further divided with every iteration. Broken connection, broken relationships, divided communities, hurt and rage are the result.
At bottom, it seems to me these are all boundary issues. Our boundaries don’t appear to work well. What can we do about that?
This very morning, I had an interesting discussion with one of my sons about this. We were talking about privacy in regard to technology, and he suggested that soon we may have to accept the idea of 0% privacy because of our increasing reliance on and use of technology. Everyone (at least in this country) will be equally exposed and we’ll have to figure out how to live with that exposure as a culture and move on, or we’ll simply self-destruct. I’d never considered this point of view and I’m fascinated with it, as well as slightly appalled.
Perhaps the chaos around boundaries is present because, as my son suggests, we’re in transformation. Transformation is inherently chaotic, after all. Maybe my generation’s ideas and beliefs about boundaries aren’t working because they’re outdated. Our world, our culture, our understanding of life, technology and science are dynamic, always changing, always correcting and expanding. Perhaps the world we live in today requires different boundaries and we’re struggling to shape them.
At the risk of sounding like an old granny, however, I think healthy, effective boundaries must contain elements of respect, compassion, authenticity, dignity and kindness, not only for others but for ourselves. I think it’s important to remember that boundaries are about ourselves and what works and doesn’t work for us. It’s not our job to choose boundaries for others. We may have to defend our boundaries and others will certainly try to violate them, but that’s the only place our power is.
Interestingly, I’m reading a book right now that relates to this. It’s called Being Wrongby Kathryn Schulz. It’s a great book — well written, funny, intelligent and thought-provoking. I highly recommend it. The reason I mention it is that so many of our rules, expectations and yes, boundaries, are based on our beliefs and we have a tendency to make our beliefs universal laws. We all do this, one way or another. But take one of your central beliefs, a hot one like politics or diet or religion, one you argue about on Facebook, block and unfriend people for disagreeing with. Now just imagine, if you can, for one minute, only 60 seconds, that you’re wrong.
Pretty uncomfortable, right? Now everything changes, including your rules, expectations, stories and, inevitably, your boundaries.
Photo by Alessio Lin on Unsplash
In other words, effective boundaries need to flex and change as we learn and grow. Otherwise, all we create is a jail cell for ourselves. We can’t change, we don’t admit new information and we keep ourselves small and rigid.
On the other hand, if we have inadequate boundaries our power is leaking all the time. We fall prey to dysfunctional relationships, our integrity breaks, we fail to take care of ourselves, and our lives don’t work well.
