There are so many things I want to tell you.
It's been one of those months where experiences stack on top of one another, and I've been leaning into these practices of "resting and digesting", allowing them to take precedence over the production schedule I have in my head. I've been listening to the feeling of deep silence and stillness in my body. I've had a few weeks of sharp contrasts. The first five days of December, I took myself on a retreat to an airbnb room in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just over an hour from where I live, yet importantly *not* where I live. One of Natalie Goldberg's rules for writing is to leave the house. Don't allow the laundry, the electric bill, the UPS package tracking, the dishes, the urge to buy snacks to serve as your excuses for not being with yourself on the page.
I know this list of temptresses well. I am fully convinced that the cat dishes need to be replenished, the fire in the woodburning stove must be stoked, the garden needs weeding, the floor needs sweeping, anything to keep me in motion rather than coming into the quietness in which the bubbles of my true experience begin to rise from somewhere back behind my guts to the center of my chest, behind my heart.
During my five days away, I was participating in a ZOOM writing and meditation retreat with Natalie and several hundred other students from around the world. We had all studied with her before, and with that familiarity, she took a deeper dive into the practice of stillness, silence, and sitting that are equal partners in her approach to writing. Each day, the structure was a morning sitting, followed by a three-hour session with Natalie in which she shared a combination of her favorite stories of writing practice, reading aloud from whatever was inspiring her, and putting us into her signature timed writing practice, starting with the word "Go!”. She would then invite several volunteers to read their writing aloud without feedback, and then we would gather to sit silently again in the early evening.
I have been a practitioner of Natalie's way of practicing writing for at least twelve years. When I was deep in the throes of burnout, near the end of my tenure as a violin school owner and teacher, I started to dream of writing memoir. An acquaintance, the fiery proud mother of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, suggested I check out Natalie’s work. I discovered her book, "Wild Mind", and it provided a way back to myself, through pen on the page. No one had ever told me I could or should just write, without editing, losing control, going for the jugular, letting it rip. It sounded exhilarating, terrifying, and filled with possibilities I had to explore, especially at that moment in my life.
I don't know that I imagined ever studying with Natalie in person until I saw her name pop up in an email in 2019. She was offering a two-week sit-walk-write memoir retreat on Madeline Island, an arts education center at the border of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. I signed up for both weeks scheduled for August 2020. In the interim, my mom received her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and I began to clear my calendar, even before the first lockdown began. I put away any plans I had made in 2019, and began the march down this path into a new, post-Covid, post-death-of-my-mother world.
What I didn't expect was the way a new world would open to me as so many of us began gathering on ZOOM. In 2021, I participated in two "live" ZOOM retreats with Natalie, and I have received a deep transmission from being in the presence, even through a screen, of someone who has sat, walked, written, taught, and practiced for more than forty years.
My first and most lasting lesson from childhood is about practice. I know practice works. We become what we practice, and we are always practicing something. What’s more rare is being consciously aware of what we are practicing, and feeling what we are becoming as we practice. My context for learning about practice was initially through classical violin and piano. Every single week, for fifteen years, I had the full attention, one-on-one, of each of my teachers in private lessons. For better or for worse, that was my normal. Lessons, practice, rehearsals, performances, competitions, concert tours. Only as an adult can I see that the opportunities for full attention and participation are truly rare in the default world.
In the practice of sitting, and in the practice of writing from the hand's motion across the page, I get to taste this quality of attention again. I have made a new friend with the truth inside myself. The truth of my experience, no good no bad. Even judgment is just judgment, nothing to eradicate.
I wrote this haiku on one of my morning slow walks during those five days:
Before a thing was
good or bad, it was itself.
Tell me about that.
After five days of staring out a picture window at the tops of redwood tress and the distant ridge lines of the coastal range, never hearing a car go by, I began to hear into a different layer of my experience. Inside the silence and the stillness and the practice of being with ourselves is the experience of accepting all that is, as it is, before it was called good or bad.
In contrast to this, I came back to the task of moving all the furniture out of the three rooms on the ground floor of my house into a storage pod, and listening from upstairs as a crew commenced demolition on a reflooring and bathroom remodeling project.
As the person managing the sourcing of all the products and learning each of the items from the ground up, my head is swirling with the lines of a spreadsheet, the first one I've created and used in nearly a decade, tracking shipping dates and numbers, deciphering specifications and measurements and features, effectively teaching myself a new language and trying to speak it in real time to the crew of contractors blasting through walls and floors.
And in the evenings, most of the time I manage to find space in which to get quiet, stop the cycle of thinking, and listen.
Do these two contrasting cauldrons of energy ever spill over into one another? Does my quietness practice inform my ability to navigate the waters of managed chaos?
This morning I had a small glimpse into the "yes" answer to this. It is the unlikely moment I allude to in the title of this week's notes.
One phase of the project was completed yesterday, and I received an invoice to pay the final balance. An ancient conditioned place in me perked up, remembering a deeply ingrained message from my childhood that said, "Get a lien release. You don't want a lien on your house. It's the worst thing that can happen when you hire contractors. Make sure you get a lien release."
I never questioned where my parents had heard this warning, or what experiences they had with it. I just took it in as a real threat, a real fear, something real to protect myself from.
I've never been in a situation to hire contractors or do a remodeling until now. So it has been more than four decades, but my body still stores and remembers that message of fear and need to protect.
I text my contractor a question, which I work hard to craft as innocent-sounding: "Do you typically provide lien releases upon final payment?"
Long pause.
Not for residential home improvement projects that don't involve general contractors. Why? he asks.
Here is the moment where the two cauldrons spill together. His question knocked on a door, which I allowed myself to open. I told him the truth, unvarnished. One, I did see it on my general contractor's contract. And two, I have a deeply ingrained childhood message about the importance of this one thing (which I'm not even totally sure how to define), and I carry intergenerational trauma around it. I used those words.
He replied, Tell me about your trauma! I have it too. I was raised to assume getting screwed and used to have lengthy contracts and preliminary notices and lien releases, living in constant fear of not getting paid. But what I found was the more relaxed I am about money, the better the relationship with the clients. It's tricky though, because money is edgy for people. But I decided, I'm not going to live that way and accept it.
My eyes teared up as I read this. He was bringing his humanity to the construction industry, which in my mind is typically a masculine patriarchal culture of stone-faced, foul-mouthed, military-like machismo. I knew from what he had revealed in our previous interactions that he had experienced loss. He was a divorced father of a 12-year-old daughter. He commutes over two hours in order to live near her, where her mother moved after the divorce. He is doing the best he can even though it is not ideal. This runs antithetical to the ethos of optimization and efficiency that courses through the veins of Silicon Valley, the lifeblood of his business clientele.
I am an anomaly, a stubborn non-participant in that value system, living as much like a homesteader as I can as this accelerating world whizzes by and surrounds me. But in the moment of his sharing, I understood something about myself -- I am not alone. There is a "we" to this experience of choosing to shed fear, of letting go of the lessons that were passed down to us about protection against a dangerous world that will eat you alive and spit you out. In his moment of sharing, which was catalyzed by my own sharing, we discovered that we come from something that is the same, we share the same concerns, and there is a new way forward. We can choose to develop trust. We can overcome our biggest fears one tiny risk at a time. Disclosure is risky.
I didn’t expect to have this opening happen around this particular trigger point, which I see as being catalyzed by my naming it as a trigger. That was a risk I took - to reveal myself in that way. And the payoff was going deeper into knowing someone else as a human being, not just someone across an imaginary negotiating table, each with lawyers by our sides.
It was a moment that gave me hope, and felt very audacious in our time. It terrifies me to think of all the reactions this story will trigger in you, with your different histories and experiences around risk, trust, contractors, and lien releases. I fear looking the naive fool, and being dismissed as such. But that fear looks smaller and smaller next to my growing friends: risk, vulnerability, and trust.
M. Scott Peck, M.D., the author of The Road Less Traveled, said:
"There can be no vulnerability without risk;
there can be no community without vulnerability;
there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.”
Actually, there is life without community, but is it the life you choose to create, accept and participate in? Is it the life that honors the gift of being alive? There is no good no bad answer to these questions. They are the ones we are here to grapple with and live into, to explore for ourselves, one risk at a time.
