Clouds

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

~ Joni Mitchell

The weather is sunny and warm and even so, it is a terrible, horrible, no good, really bad day.* I'm afraid of and angry at everything.

I'm afraid and angry about the discomfort in my body. I'm sick to death of hobbling around strapped in this hot, heavy robo-boot. Soreness in my feet and ankles, painful twinges in knees and hips after nearly two months with a toaster oven velcroed to my leg, tension even my neck and shoulders -- all of it pisses me off and scares the bejeezus out of me.

I'm frightened and furious about how this injury impacts the way I move, what I can do and how I can be with people. I'm angry at everyone who can walk normally and drive themselves places and stand up in the shower.

I'm afraid and angry that this may not be over anytime soon. Afraid and angry that I don't know how this is going to go.

This is not my first fear and fury rodeo. I know what's going on, so I do all the things: move my body, go out in the sunshine, read some Pema, breathe breathe breathe. Nothing loosens the grip. Even dunking myself, temporarily bootless, in the cold river doesn't shake the dread and rage.

I know it doesn't help me to stew in pity and bitterness. I know that my practice is to embrace the inherent uncertainty of living. But knowing is one thing and feeling is another and the feeling I'm feeling is that I hate it all with all that I have.

Exhausted, I plunk myself on the planks of our front porch under the late summer sun. I think maybe I can bake it out of me, so I lay down, squeeze my eyes shut, and stew in my suffering.

I can feel the bite of the sun on my skin and the snarl of tangled barbed wire emotions around my heart. For all the world, it feels like I am stuck here.

Every single meditation teacher I've ever had says it: thoughts and emotions come and go like clouds floating through an open sky. As Ani Pema says, “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”

I sneak one eye open - then both - and look into the huge blue sky dotted with puffy little clouds. "There's the sky with its Thought&EmotionClouds," I think. "OK. I'm ready. Let them float on through."

But the clouds don't move. They just sit there. No floating. No drifting to the horizon. No gentle coasting out of sight. Just clouds stuck and static over my miserable self, blocking the sun, as Joni sings.

I squeeze my eyes shut again. "That's just f***ing perfect," I think. "Of course they aren't moving. They are calcified to the sky, just like I'm calcified in my fear and anger.” Even the freaking sky is a reflection of my own wretched stuckness.

I open my eyes again and scowl at that stupid little stuck cloud. It sits there and sits there … and then one edge of it slowly slowly dissolves into the blue. It's not moving or drifting or floating and it is changing. I watch for one minute, then two, and it finally disappears.

I look at another fluffy little cloud that is perched over our porch and it, too, is not floating or going anywhere but very very slowly wisping away at the edges. Then right where it is ... it disappears.

After half an hour of watching the non-floaty clouds dissolve and shift, I sigh, hoist my booted self off the hot decking and go inside.

I'd love to say that once I saw that even static, unfloating clouds do change, that the storm inside me shifted and dissolved, too.

It didn't.

Not right away. It took a long sitting-on-the-floor shower. And some leftover pizza. And some loud music. And trash TV. And several long hugs. After all of that and some sleep, my own non-drifting Thought&EmotionClouds, softened and let go.

You are the sky. Everything else is just weather. Even when all you can see is a solid bank of clouds. Even when the clouds don't move as fast as you'd like or at all. Even when it looks like everything is cemented in place, it isn't.

Even when the weather moves infuriatingly slowly, still we are the sky.

* I've actually never read the famous book by Judith Viorst, but the title sure does sum things right up.

Scaredypants, Perfectypants & Other Stories I Tell Myself

All it takes is a twinge. A pain, no matter how small. Any soreness whatsoever and my mind is off to the races.

“You've messed it up." "You've reinjured yourself." "You've done something wrong and now your foot is not healing." "It's irretrievably broken and it's all your fault."

My mind, the master meaning-making machine, tells a big fat story. These days my mind's story-telling muscles flex ferociously around my broken foot.

Scaredypants: A Story

Scaredypants: A Story

I am at my follow up appointment and the doctors huddle around the xrays with concern. The surgeon is called in. Brows are knit. They don't like the way it looks. They will have to do surgery. They aren't sure it will work but it's a desperate next step. It will keep me off my feet for another 3-6 months. And it may well never heal properly. And my life as I know it will be over.

I spin and spin and spin. Until I catch myself. Until I pause and remind myself that it's all a made-up story. I don't know anything – not one single thing -- about what's actually happening in my foot.

The mind lunges for the safety of stories. Stories are its way of taking the swirling unknown and making it solid and stable. Stories, even shitty Scaredypants Stories, give us ground to stand on in life's freefall of groundlessness.

In her Psychology Today piece Understanding Interoception, Dr. Marianna Pogosyan describes interoception as our ability to sense and interpret sensations happening inside the body. She goes on to explain that

Interoceptive beliefs, such as how valuable or dangerous people believe their bodily signals are, can matter for experiences like stress. For example, individuals with anxiety sensitivity are more likely to 'catastrophize’ and become distressed by increased heartbeats during a stressor compared to individuals without anxiety sensitivity.

Exactly. The fuel of my anxiety sparks my Scaredypants Story into a catastrophized conflagration. And that fire burns hottest at night. Horizontal thinking, as Liz Gilbert calls it, spurs my mind to scramble for a toehold. In the swirl of fear and uncertainty, it tells me a tale of how everything will be ruined. It may give my mind some sense of control but (no surprise), it feels terrible to the rest of me.

One night, my foot aches and I start in on telling the tired old Scaredypants Story. I pause and remind myself that this is just fictive fortune telling. What if I told myself a better story? A perfect story, even.

Susan’s Perfectypants Story

Perfectypants: Another Story

I get the follow-up x-rays and the doctors again huddle around but this time they are with amazement and delight. "Wow! We've never seen such complete healing before!" "Your foot has healed stronger than ever. There is nothing you can't do on it now." "You just go right ahead and throw that boot out the window or, if you'd rather, smash it with every ounce of your strength on a rock. Either way." Then they ask if they can take my picture and use my x-rays to teach young orthopedists how this healing thing is done.

The Perfectypants Story makes me laugh. It's easy to see that it's ridiculously silly. In a way that it's not so easy to see that the Scaredypants Story is. But they both are. They are both utter fictions.

Dr. Pogosyan goes on to say

[I]t is important to find a middle ground. On the one hand, people who over-focus on the body may be more likely to “over-detect” or overinterpret their bodily signals—such as in cases of hypochondriasis or anxiety. But it’s also problematic to go too far the other way and actively ignore, suppress, or discount bodily signals. ... A middle ground—not too much and not too little interoception—is likely optimal for physical and psychological health.

The Middle Way

Buddhists call it The Middle Way: neither leaning in nor pulling away, neither grasping nor resisting but rather resting in the space between.

Pema Chödrön writes, “The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.”

There is an odd, awkward comfort in dropping the story, relaxing with the not-knowing and seeing the stories for what they are. And when we do choose to tell ourselves a story, why not make it one that makes you laugh?

Immersion

First, cool water surrounds my feet, legs, belly, shoulders. And then it's the sound. Or rather, the lack of sound. My head goes underwater, and I am saturated by a muffled quiet. The water supports me unconditionally as I exhale, I can almost feel the heartbeat of the water, then I come to the surface and breathe.

My nephew, Noah was in federal prison for seven years. During that time, he couldn't wear what he wanted, couldn't eat what he wanted, couldn't choose who to live with ... and he couldn't be fully immersed in water. The innumerable restrictions of prison life are mind blowing but not being able to be immersed, this feels particularly painful.

I know that the reasoning behind the restriction is to protect prisoners from the real danger of self-harm. So, while I get this heartbreaking rule, it feels like a deep loss. There is something so healing and restorative about being fully in water. The thought of losing that sensation takes my breath away.

Three days after breaking my foot in July, I was lucky enough to be floating in my niece Morgan's (Noah's sister!) pool. I sorted out a way to crabwalk myself to the edge, take off my Robo-boot, and slide into the water. Each time, the cool clear pool swoosh soothed my jangled nervous system. After hobbling on crutches and feeling awkward on land, in the water I moved -- weightless and effortless. I even borrowed a couple of the kids' pool noodles and found a way to float with my foot elevated which was a certain kind of genius, I have to say.

Not everyone loves being immersed in water, I know. But being immersed in SOMEthing is a deeply human enterprise.

Artists and athletes might call it the flow state. Academics and writers might call it a deep dive (or a rabbit hole!). Learners and meditators might call it an intensive or a retreat. Whatever you call it, the choice to immerse yourself offers calm, healing, and intrinsic happiness.

Whenever we immerse ourselves, we let go of distraction and busyness to focus on something. Whether it's playing an instrument, researching the life of Anna Mani or making your mother's gazpacho recipe, diving fully into whatever we are doing creates focus. The flits and flights of attention settle while we are immersed. And with that focus comes a quieting of mind and nervous system, even if your activity is a physical one. The noisiness fades into the background. Immersing yourself especially in something you choose to do for its own sake, leads to intrinsic satisfaction rather than relying on outside affirmation to feel good about it.

What do you love to be immersed in? What do you not allow yourself to be immersed in because it seems impractical or not productive? If you could take time to immerse in something today, what might it be?

As much as I love the feel of the water, for me, it's the quiet. Even when I slide myself into the river under the waterfall, the shush of falling water quiets to a hum. I have the same sensation when I make a piece of art, teach a class or write here to y'all: focused flow.

Immersion is medicine. Dive in.

Wilder-ness

The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park is perched on the edge of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The park is home to waterfalls, high lakes, virgin forest, wild turkeys … and spotted knapweed. The fragile ecosystem is being overrun by a deceptively pretty flower.

On our trip to the Porkies in July, we met up with park naturalist, Katie Urban and a team of local environmentalists to hike into the wilderness and yank out the knapweed. We’d never heard of spotted knapweed, but as soon as Katie pointed it out, we realized we’d been seeing it everywhere in Michigan. Its lacy, pink thistle-like flower belies its tenacious fibrous stem, deep taproot and the toxin it puts in the soil that prevents native species from growing.

It was satisfying to spend a few hours with these dedicated folks, pulling out piles of knapweed from along a pristine wilderness trail.

Satisfying...and also discouraging. The stuff is everywhere. The seeds carry in the wind and on hikers’ shoes. The plants need almost no soil or water to thrive. We pulled out bags and bags of it, but we couldn’t get it all.

Spotted knapweed is like lots of toxic things – racism, patriarchy, mansplaining – once you know what it looks like, you see it everywhere. No matter how much we want to eradicate it, no matter how much we’d like the environment to return to its natural, balanced state, its ubiquity is daunting.

Katie the Naturalist (shown above with a spotted fish not spotted knapweed) encouraged us not to despair. “We won’t be able to get it all,” she said. “But if we keep at it, keep clearing out some prime precious places, the natural ecosystem will grow.”

While we traveled through the upper Midwest, I kept thinking about invasives taking over the wilderness. I love these wild spaces and felt sad to think of them being overtaken by things that aren’t meant to be there.

I wondered, too, about my own body, mind, heart and life: what is invading my natural state? What is crowding out my intuition, my creativity, my peace? What is taking over my wilder nature, my own wilder-ness?

As I looked for spotted knapweed in my own heart and mind, I found distraction, catastrophizing and fear. Posts, emails and pictures that keep me busy and numb. Spinning out the worst possible outcome from the doctor’s appointment, my friend’s troubled child or the latest headline. And fear -- at the root of most of my invasives -- of discomfort, of uncertainty, of chaos.

What is it that invades your natural habitat? Social media? Screens? Scary thoughts? News? Nightmares? Needs of others? Work? Worry? What you have to do next? Walk the trail of your experience and look for what is encroaching on you. What is crowding out that which is meant to grow in you?

Your natural ecosystem, your wilder-ness is wide open, spacious and at peace. As Pema Chodron says, “You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got all kinds of big weather patterns moving through me most of the time.

In her book, Diana, Herself: An Allegory of Awakening, Martha Beck writes:

“Just like any civilized person, you’ve spent practically your whole life torturing an innocent wild creature. Starved it, then force-fed it, cut it, cursed it, driven it to exhaustion. Imprisoned it with other creatures who tormented it.”

“What?” Diana shakes her head in miserable confusion. “I don’t even kill spiders! I never wanted to hurt anything.”

“The innocent wild creature to which I refer, my darling, is you.”

What if you nurtured your wilder-ness, your natural state of spaciousness and peace? What if you spent more time in your wild natural state of spaciousness? Maybe you will notice the sometimes deceptively pretty things that are crowding you out. Maybe you can clear some of them away. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to remove all of them, but perhaps you can free a few precious spaces for your wilder-ness to thrive. And maybe that’s enough.

Adventures Unplanned

[T]he truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid. Wherever we are, we can train as a warrior.

~ Pema Chödrön

Halfway through a hiking and biking holiday with my husband, I break a bone in my foot – the second break in as many years. We’ve been planning this trip for a year and now I can neither hike nor bike.

Head in my hands, I feel terrible, “This has ruined our adventure. I’m so sorry.”

He looks at me and wisely says, “We are still on an adventure. Just not the adventure we planned.”

I love a plan. I love knowing how things are going to go – or rather, the illusion of knowing how things are going to go. My gripping attachment to said plans, however, has been the greatest ongoing source of my suffering. I want to know how my class is going to go, what the doctor is going to say, how the election is going to turn out, how everything is going to turn out.

“Tough nuggets, sister,” says the Universe. No one really knows.

It is a true and deeply annoying fact that our lives are based in uncertainty and groundlessness. We never know what will happen … and the actual adventure is whatever is happening.

So when Frank reminds me that we are having an adventure, I begrudgingly get it. I want things to go the way I want things to go...even though my experience has rarely borne that out.

Once at the beginning of a class, I asked the 30+ people in the room, “Who is still on Plan A?” One person raised her hand. She was 18 years old. She hadn’t graduated high school yet. Everybody else was on Plan B, C or Z.

If a global pandemic taught us anything, it has to be this: we never know what is going to happen. And as Ani Pema says, “this not-knowing is part of the adventure.”

Think about your own life. How much of what is happening for you now was something you predicted? How much of the adventure you envisioned is actually happening? What unexpected things changed your trajectory? What unplanned adventure are you living now?

In her book, Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng’s character Mia is an artist who follows her intuition and instincts. When young Izzy wants to know how she makes photographs, Mia says,

“I don’t have a plan, I’m afraid….But then, no one really does, no matter what they say.”

I actually think Mia does have a plan: show up and see what happens, keep practicing and build capacity to respond to what unfolds. This kind of plan feels brave and radical. In my wisest moments, I aspire to it.

When I am at my most skillful, I make a plan and I do my best to hold it lightly and see where it takes me. I choose my adventure with the knowledge that that adventure may or may not choose me.

And when things go sideways or bump off the edge in an unexpected way, I remind myself (or my kind partner reminds me), “I am having an adventure. Just not the adventure I'd planned.”