This sentence, a quote from Kathleen Norris, who writes movingly in many books of grappling with perfectionism and her spiritual journey, was to be the title of one of the sections in my upcoming memoir, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, about my similar struggles. But I had to cut it when my editor suggested that three sections would work better than the five I’d originally had. As usual, she was correct.
But its personal resonance has never left me; this morning during a very challenging zoom yoga class with a new teacher, its noisy dictates blared back to me as I struggled to get the unfamiliar poses exactly right.
Read moreNine days in quarantine. Instead of sitting here in my Lakeville study, I’d be on my way home from Ucross today, stopping off in Denver to see old friends, hugging them both long and hard, getting together with their families, going out to dinner at the fun restaurant they’d chosen. Wow. How things have changed in the world, in such a short time. Those plans were scrapped several weeks ago, and as I’ve already written, I came back early and have been keeping “social distance” from my husband and also in quarantine here, in case I got infected in my travels.
Read moreSpinning from news too intense, too constant, to absorb, I reach for the keyboard, the notebook, to ground myself. But instead of writing, I look out at the cottonwoods, the patches of snow on the sagebrush, the distant mountains. How I will miss this place, where I’ve felt found again—pieces of myself at last gathered into a bouquet of balance.
Read moreI’ve been here before. When our son died suddenly and shockingly in an accident thirty-two years ago, the ground shifted, the air smelled gray, there was no sun in the sky. Things that had once seemed so important ceased to exist a world that had shrunk to the size of a snow globe. Eating, sleeping, interacting with others became robotic endeavors; desire to do anything but grieve my lost boy, go to his grave and talk to him, stay close to my husband and older son and those who had known him, his friends, our families—all dissipated. We no longer wanted to go anywhere or socialize outside our home.
Read moreI’m trying to write a poem, the task I’ve set myself for each day here, but nothing is coming. There is just too much terror in the air for me to settle into image. Even though I’m away from the East coast here in Wyoming, where the sheer vastness of the land makes me feel that I’m the only person in the world--- like I did yesterday when I climbed through the red mud up to the ridge that overlooked a panoramic mountain range—despite the awe, the cherished solitude, I read of the world’s fearful crashing and taste my own.
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