Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew's Blog, page 8

Writing as Longing

 Over the next few months I’ll periodically share excerpts from Writing the Sacred Journey–I’m taking a break from writing about writing to actually do some writing!

When I was attending Sleepy Hollow High School, I’d occasionally forsake the rowdy bus ride home and walk two miles down the steep streets of North Tarrytown, New York, over the infamous bridge where Ichabod Crane is said to have disappeared, and down to the Hudson River… Once I reached the beach, I…ran to a log polished silver and reclining on the sand.  Here I could have the river to myself–the murky water and the private tuck of shoreline that lay flat like a vast, open palm.  In that rare moment of solitude I felt a terrific ache.  I wanted to cleave my heart to that dynamic, undulating force that smelled of sea salt and spanned boundless distances.  My teenage life was small–fretted with self-consciousness and my peers’ misguided expectations.  Still, I knew the passion buzzing in my adolescent body was also rolling in that tide.  I watched the waves push and pull, and the coarse sand simmer before absorbing the water.  I breathed the moist, kelp-scented air.  Passion fused me to the river, but there was no release.  I was still my lanky, lonely self.  I could never dissolve into such magnificence.

What, then, could I do to ease my ache?  If I prayed, God’s pervasive, dissatisfying silence only intensified my longing.  Instead I dug into my jeans’ pocket for scrap paper and a ballpoint pen.  I did the only thing that transformed my longing into something of substance.  I wrote about it.

I no longer have my teenage writing as evidence, but two things remain clear in my memory.  One is the inexplicable longing that pushed my pen forward.  I remember wanting to burst out of my skin, to become as big on the outside as I felt on the inside.  The fac that I was separate from the undulating fabric of the natural world–that I was an independent being–discomfited me.  I wanted unity.  I wanted to be bound to the tide, to be awash with the created world.

The other thing I remember is that I wrote about what I knew:  the river beating against sand, the driftwood hard against my legs, the seagulls holding wind.  I wrote my world and, in doing so,, felt myself participate fully in its unfolding.  I might never accurately describe the salt scent kicked up in the spray, but the attempt changed me; it joined me to the work so evident around me:  birthing, changing, destroying, and roiling with beauty.

Today, my drive to write is the same–language, penned to paper, binds the inner world to the outer, satisfying my desire to unite with creation.  Why does the effort of translating experience into story satisfy a spiritual need?  Over the years I’ve written three (now five!) books, countless short memoirs, personal essays, church newsletter columns, poems, and journal entries.  I’ve written myself out of the closet, out of depression, out of regular employment, and into work that fosters a similar passion for writing in others, And still, how writing binds self to creation remains a mystery.  I write to find out.

from Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art & Practice of Spiritual Memoir by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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July garage sale!

Help me make space for lawn games and bird seed in my garage by buying a book!  For the month of July, I’m selling my three creative works (Swinging on the Garden Gate, a coming out story celebrating our embodied spirits; On the Threshold, essays about finding the sacred in the ordinary; and Hannah, Delivered, a novel that embraces natural birth as a guide to personal emergence) at steep discounts and mailing them at no cost to you.  I’m also selling Writing the Sacred Journey and Living Revision at the regular price but with free shipping.  I’d rather these books were being read than gathering dust in my garage!

Swinging on the Garden Gate:  A Spiritual Memoir.  $5


On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, & Holiness.  $10


Hannah, Delivered.  $10


A set of all three: $20

FREE SHIPPING!  Order here.

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Internet Mind

Back before the Internet, when my two sources of interruption were the mailman and the telephone, my computer functioned like a typewriter or notebook, singular in its purpose. I like to imagine that I could focus, settling down into a project, losing myself in creation and emerging hours later, but the truth is I grasped for distractions even then—a hangnail, lukewarm coffee in need of heating, the dirty laundry which might as well go into the washer because I wasn’t getting much done anyhow.

Prayer was no different. I imagined I could clear my thoughts, that I could enter silence like a vast, dark cavern and finally find some peace while really my mind was a first grade classroom where the teacher says, “Today we’ll learn to tell time,” and one kid raises his hand to say, “My brother got a watch for his birthday,” the next says, “I want a Lego set for my birthday,” and the third says, “Once I built a dragon with Legos.” I’ve been a guest author at women’s book group discussions that go about as well, and it’s no wonder. That’s how our brains work. Prayer back then was striving after quiet.

Today I know it’s hopeless. The best I’ll ever do is see myself thinking and let the thought go. This is what prayer looks like for me: Catch and release. The exercise would seem pointless if the microsecond of quiet following each release didn’t ripple out into the pond of my days.

I rise from prayer to my writing desk, where my tool now is also a portal into a vast world of information and virtual relationships and relentless communications—the ideal instrument for a grasping mind. When I focus, dipping into a place of attention and listening so that the house stills around me and I’m fully engaged in writing, there’s always this small, panicky self dashing around in search of a quick fix. An email in my in-box or an alert in Facebook says, “You’re important! You’re wanted! Attend here now!” and I do, with an ensuing rush of satisfaction. Here at my fingertips is a tool able to satisfy my every ego need. I can Google anything, including myself. When a question pops into my head I can find an immediate answer, with its ensuing boost. Oh, yes! I’m part of things. I’m not lost in an abyss. If I had a Smartphone I could have a hit anytime, which is why I don’t.

After a high like that, my writing project seems like a historical period I can’t time-travel back into, and prayer is worse, fruitless. For the Internet mind, creative writing and prayer are nothing; they don’t link or gratify or have measurable outcomes. The small, satiated self scorns erasure.

The true self, present from the start and identifiable in that microsecond of silence after I release a thought, knows better. So I turn off the Internet as my contemporary horsehair shirt—my practice of denial, at least for the duration of writing. The trouble is, I can’t turn off my Internet mind. So this is what prayer is like for me today, noticing my internal grasping distractions and repeatedly, lovingly, turning them off. Fleeting as that microsecond of release may be, it contains more life than the Internet ever will, and I trust it. –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew


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Check out Living Revision, now with the Nautilus Silver Award on the cover.  I’m grateful to Nautilus for its mission “to celebrate and honor books that support conscious living & green values, high-level wellness, positive social change & social justice, and spiritual growth.” I’m especially pleased that the judges see these qualities in Living Revision.

Happy summer, all!

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The Tabula Rasa

After having done all I can for a writing project—after it’s finished, published, promoted, and my energy for it is exhausted—I enter creativity’s no-man’s-land. It’s a sprawling, barren landscape. Either I’m worn out from the last project with little energy for the next, or I feel used up, as though I’ve reached the end of inspiration’s wellspring, or I’m writing but whatever I draft is a sprawling, blathering desert of words. I feel bereft; I’ve left a lovely world of my own making and can never return. I’m hopeless, because despite whatever success my project achieved, it’s inadequate, and besides, what more could I possibly do? I wonder whether I’ll ever write well again.

Luckily I’ve been around this block enough times to know this emptiness passes. I can be more patient now that I recognize the signs. The end of a project is like a death; something we love is over, leaving us forlorn, listless, insecure, disoriented—and open. A friend of mine calls this an experience of the “tabula rasa,” a scraped tablet or clean slate. I think of it as a blank page with a history, emptiness that’s been filled and emptied again, a revised nothingness. It’s an intriguing place, although it’s difficult to stay there. We humans have a propensity to fill it as quickly as possible, in hopes of satisfying our need to be busy, productive, and significant or as a way to avoid discomfort. It reminds me of the emptiness in meditation which my frantic, scrambling mind resists with every trick in the book.

I find it interesting that the writing process is bookended by emptiness. It’s like our creative endeavors rise out of the void like the Big Bang within a vast field of nothing, and then they return to a different form of nothing that’s more like death than space. What I know about writing, at least, is that if I accept the emptiness afterward with a full heart—if I grieve what I’ve lost, own my inability to do anything about it, acknowledge my debt to the source of inspiration, and give all this time—some spark of new life will come out of nowhere and I’ll be creative once again.

The fact that the artistic process includes emptiness says something important, I think, about creation itself. Emptiness is part of becoming. Learning to embrace emptiness is part of our path to becoming fully human. I love how writing helps me practice!  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Please join me to explore Community and Revision at Wisdom Ways, June 14th from 1:30-3:30!

Stephen King says, “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open”—but we can open that door slowly and deliberately.  To conclude our season of celebrating community, we’ll explore life-giving ways to welcome others’ eyes as a means for re-seeing our work.  How can we preserve our sense of safety, freedom, and exploration in the writing process while also sharing our writing?  Might our memoirs help us foster sacred connections to others?

Here’s hoping you have a great summer!


Warmly,


Elizabeth

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The Calculus of Faith

“What’s calculus?” Gwyn asked over dinner. Both Emily and I took calculus in high school but neither of us could answer, me because I’d promptly forgotten everything once I took the AP test, and Emily because how do you explain calculus to a ten-year-old? “It has to do with measuring amounts that change over time, like a car picking up speed,” Emily said. “Maybe?”

A week later the three of us were at church, about to serve a free meal, when we struck up a conversation with our pastor. Topics leapt from Gwyn’s deep skepticism about the existence of God to her passion for math. Paula said to Gwyn, “My relationship with math stopped growing when I was about your age.”

I could relate. I deftly avoided math in college, but I remember attending my good friend Heather’s thesis defense; Heather is a genius who started college-level math at age 11 and manages to make math sound magical, playful, and pertinent. I listened to her enthuse about dimensions beyond the four I could imagine and realized suddenly that what I’d known as math up until then (memorizing formulas, plugging in numbers, despising how empty it all seemed) was practically unrelated to the invisible structural wonders of Heather’s universe. I, too, have an immature relationship with math.

Then, that same evening at church, a guy came through the line balancing his plate on a textbook. “Studying over dinner?” I asked, spooning Ranch dressing on his salad.

“Yup.”

Gwyn gave him an orange. Instead of offering him a cookie, Emily asked, “Is that a calculus textbook?”

“Yup.”

“Can you explain calculus to us?” About twenty people were waiting in line behind him, but this guy said, without blinking, “Calculus deals with the properties of derivatives and integrals of functions, by methods originally based on the summation of infinitesimal differences”—or something like that; I copied out this definition because whatever he said went in one ear and out the other. The three of us were amazed, we thanked him, and we remained clueless.

A few days later we called Heather over Skype. While she told Gwyn stories of figuring out how to walk on a mountain if you don’t want your height to change, I was so absorbed in the miracle of Gwyn getting it that I forgot to pay attention. Thank goodness there’s an adult in Gwyn’s life eyes spark at the magnificence of mathematics.

But I’m also grateful to our pastor, who sees Gwyn’s cynicism about that great bearded white guy in the sky for what it is—an early and woefully simplistic understanding of (and then rejection of) holiness. Here’s hoping we can communicate to Gwyn—to anyone, to everyone—the beautiful calculus of faith.    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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One last drop-in spiritual memoir class before we break for the summer.  Please join me at Wisdom Ways on Friday, June 14 from 1:30-3:30 to explore revision as a spiritual practice. Here’s the description:

Stephen King says, “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open”—but we can open that door slowly and deliberately. To conclude our season of celebrating community, we’ll explore life-giving ways to welcome others’ eyes as a means for re-seeing our work. How can we preserve our sense of safety, freedom, and exploration in the writing process while also sharing our writing? Might our memoirs help us foster sacred connections to others?

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Your Stories are Wiser Than You Are

Whenever readers express their admiration for what I’ve created, I feel abashed. For many years I interpreted this as feeling fraudulent, as though surely I hadn’t written whatever they’d read or perhaps they were projecting their own unintegrated esteem onto me or buttering me up. Then I went through a spell of deliberately trying to take in others’ praise. I’ve earned it! I told myself. But that didn’t sit right. Later I tried practicing gratitude; the opportunity to have a reader read my words is a real gift, and doubly so when the reading experience matters to the reader.

Somehow, though, none of these reactions to others’ praise felt right. Was I conditioned to deflect compliments? Why, despite positive responses, did I never feel worthy?

While every interaction is probably a stew of projection, insecurity, pride, and gratitude, I now see another factor at play. Milan Kundera once wrote that “great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors,” and I know this keenly: My successful pieces are wiser than I am. Essays I wrote a decade ago reach conclusions I’m only living into today. Literary forms have the capacity to hold more meaning, unity, and power than the people who create them. This is why hypocritical jerks can write great literature. And why I hesitate to accept full credit for my successes.

Recently I read a lesson from Mark Silver, a Sufi and business teacher, which he had prefaced with these words:

In the Name of the One, the Infinitely Merciful, the Most Tenderly Compassionate, this book is dedicated to the Face of the Real.

Anything of the Truth that is written here has come from the One, and any mistakes or omissions are from myself.

That’s it! I thought. That spark of inspiration in my writing that then is reflected in my reader’s eyes? I didn’t generate it; I just created a form to hold it. My abashed bafflement isn’t false humility; it’s genuine amazement. I can return to a piece I’ve written and experience the same awe as my reader, which is a beautiful experience. If I don’t lay claim to that magic but continue to respect its gifts, those gifts keep moving.

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Here’s my latest newsletter in case you missed it, where I share publication news from clients and students.  Be sure to check out their books.

I’ll be reading from my essay, “Wearing Bi-Focals” at the launch of Queer Voices, an anthology of GLBTQIA+ writing from Minnesota, at Open Book on May 14 from 7-9.  Hope to see you there!

There are two more opportunities for you to write spiritual memoir with me this spring.  Please drop in!  Wisdom Ways Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions.

May 10, 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Childhood, Revisited


June 14, 1:30-3:30 p.m.: Community and Revision

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April Snowballs

Our mid-April blizzard (and ensuing school release day; arg!) has melted down to patches of wet, icy snow on Minneapolis’s boulevards. This is the kind of loose snow you can easily scoop and pack that only appears in the spring. Our family after-dinner walks to the lake have naturally turned into moving snowball fights. Sun warms our shoulders, loons dive down at the lake, an occasional heron flies overhead, and we sling snowballs at each other. We reenact the dual between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. We hurl them into the lake. We aim at stop signs. They splat, leaving a wet smear. They soak through our mittens.

I grew up in New York, where spring starts in March. Even after thirty-two years of living in Minnesota, even though I honestly love the winter, I’m tormented by this spell from March through April. My body says “Enough already!” and my mind turns toward the garden. I had planted kale under the cloche and sugar snaps along the back fence just before we were blanketed in ten fresh inches. Suddenly my equanimity toward the cold collapsed. I joined everyone else in the Midwest in griping about the weather.

Today patches of snow linger in the shade while the grass greens fast and the rivers run high. Snowball fights, which for most of the winter aren’t possible because the snow is too cold to pack, are now sheer delight. When my mittens turn soggy the air is warm enough I can tolerate grabbing a fistful of snow with bare hands. Our three-way, traveling snowball fight pauses frequently for other neighbors out on their evening stroll. Everyone smiles.

Here is the flip-side of too many dark, cold days: This glorious, enthusiastic emergence of humans onto our sidewalks and birds into our parks and new life everywhere! We’re all giddy. We can breathe freely again, we can walk outside without guarding our steps, we can propel ourselves long distances safely, we can even comfortably, amazingly, sit! This exultation only comes from weathering winter; it’s a unique gift for having suffered the cold. Those in warmer climes never know this particular mix of relief and anticipation and glory and full-bodied movement. It’s expansive, communal, playful, and I want to take it in until I’m completely soaked.   –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Here are the last two Wisdom Ways Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions before we break for the summer:

May 10: Childhood, Revisited


June 14: Community and Revision

I’m excited to have an essay included in Queer Voices, an anthology published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.  “Wearing Bifocals” looks at the  queer community’s spiritual potential to see through nondual lenses.  The book launch will be on May 14 from 7-9 p.m. at Open Book, but this is just one of many events celebrating the collection.

Happy spring, everyone!

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You, Sounding Through Me

Endel, an artist friend of mine, believes that the audience for a work of art emerges from the artist. Whoa! Let me say that again. Endel thinks that audience evolves from the artist through the art into the real people who encounter the art.

This makes my head spin. I’ve always thought of audience as a bunch of people scattered around the country like you, my faithful blog readers; I reach out to you with these words; you read them (or not) and become their audience (or don’t). When I write I have you in mind but I imagine you as separate from me in identity and body. I think of my words as bridging the gap between us.

Endel doesn’t. He traces the noun “audience” back to its Latin origin, audire, the verb “to hear,” and embraces its implied receptivity. “To audience,” he writes, is to “receive from Source by truly hearing in the act of sacred listening.” Artists “audience” inspiration, and this then plants an “audience seed” in us. We cultivate the seed by making art. The audience grows as the art grows. When the art is launched into the world, the seed breaks ground, taking form as a living person or, if we’re lucky, many people.

Endel is teaching me an entirely new way to think about art—and others. The word “person,” he points out, means “sounding through.” A spark of life or inspiration sounds through us into our creations and sounds through our creations into other living, breathing creations who are also sparks of life and sources of inspiration. I’m reminded of the Nguni Bantu word ubuntu from South Africa: “A person is a person through other persons.” We become persons by sounding through each other.

If this is true, then some part of you is deeply within me. By writing I tend that part until it’s strong enough to reach out across cyberspace to sound within you. Which means you wrote this piece. Thanks! I’m mystified, but grateful.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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I’ve just learned that Living Revision won a silver Nautilus Book Award!  Hooray!  I’ve long admired the Nautilus Award for honoring books that “support conscious living & green values, high-level wellness, positive social change & social justice, and spiritual growth.”  Be sure to check out their great lists.  Thanks to Skinner House for making this possible.

Hard to believe, but there’s only three more Wisdom Ways Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions before we break for the summer.  Join me this Friday, April 12, from 1:30-3:30 to explore form.  Every bit of creation has an inherent, unique form—including our stories. We’ll experiment with structural possibilities for spiritual memoir, reflect on how form follows function in writing, and practice listening for emergent unity within the fragments of our memories. Our remaining topics are:

May 10: Childhood, Revisited


June 14: Community and Revision

And look what landed on my desk yesterday!  Isn’t it gorgeous?  The book launch, hosted by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, will be on May 14 from 7-9 p.m. at Open Book.  I hope you can come!

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Strange Humility

When my mother died I inherited some money from her life insurance policy. Most of it went directly toward retirement but there were two small extravagances I indulged in and about which my mother would’ve wholeheartedly approved: I bought my first couch after 25 years of sitting on a futon, and we hired once-a-month housecleaning help.

My mother kept an immaculate home. You could have eaten a meal off her garage floor. When she died, the state of her craft cupboards made me cry: Every shelf was neat, every box labeled, every item there was either significant or useful. My mother elevated home-making to an art and, perhaps unusual for a woman of her generation, for the most part she thrived in it.

So I grew up in a joyfully clean home. I took my mother’s sense of order and cleanliness for granted until I became an adult and realized that the time and energy she invested in her home was, for me, unsustainable. I inherited her joy in housework and her satisfaction in cleanliness, but I also inherited her values (creativity, community engagement, social action), which for me, especially now that I have an exuberantly creative kid, all too often take precedence over housework. Which means I live with messes. And dust bunnies. And disorderly closets.

Like my mother, I take pride in housework; an hour spent scrubbing the oven by hand I find deeply satisfying. I look back on my childless days, when I could give an afternoon to dusting and reorganizing my bookshelves, with longing. At the same time, whenever I’m confronted with a choice—clean or play with Gwyn? clean or write? clean or go to the school equity group?—there’s really no choice. The decision to pay someone to help was both a concession (I had to admit I couldn’t do it all) and an acceptance of our privilege: We can act on our values and have a clean house. Once a month.

The work of realizing privilege, accepting it, and acting from it is so complex! Because my clean house comes to me as a gift, I have a consequential strange sense of disempowerment. I can no longer claim the state of my home as my doing. I’m tempted to attach my pride to other things (parenting, work) to make up for the lack, but truth be told, every dimension of my life is gift—the fact that I have a daughter to parent, work I love, talents that matter, a roof over my head, a healthy body… My every breath is a gift, and accepting this feels like falling down a bottomless well of humility.

If even my agency is a gift passed along by my family genes and my upbringing and white privilege and happenstance, then any sense that that agency is mine is an illusion. Down that well, I imagine, we’re swept away in a mighty stream of gift-receiving and gift-giving. It’s dark there, but it’s also a lively and life-giving place to be. There’s not much to hang onto except, perhaps, each other. –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Coming in May–the release of Queer Voices! Pre-order it today!

Join me for these upcoming spiritual memoir sessions, second Fridays, 1:30-3:30 p.m., at  Wisdom Ways Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions.

April 12: Parts in the Whole: Form


May 10: Childhood, Revisited


June 14: Community and Revision

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Receive the Blessings of Failure

There’s an old Taoist story about a farmer whose horse ran away. His neighbors on hearing this came to him and said, sympathetically, “Such bad luck!”

“We’ll see,” the farmer replied.

The next day the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “So wonderful!” the neighbors exclaimed.

“We’ll see,” the farmer said.

Then the farmer’s son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. The neighbors offered their sympathy for his misfortune.

“We’ll see,” the farmer said.

The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated him on how well things had turned out.

You can guess the farmer’s reply.

I’m thinking of this story in relation to writers and publishing, how our emotions get jerked around as we anticipate, experience, and fail to experience others reading our work. The calmness of this farmer is a good model for all of us. Equanimity like his is born of resisting judgment and cultivating possibility.

Personally I’m great at the latter—I’m a dreamer and worrier; I have no trouble imagining possibilities. But the former is a challenge. Excitement, disappointment, anticipation, frustration, and the whole gamut of emotions tend to take me for rides. So when I submit pieces to journals I have high hopes, which are dashed when those pieces are rejected and elevated if they’re printed. Then my joy is fleeting because a bad review (or more often no review) tramples it. I’m a victim of my emotional attachments.

Honestly, I’m tired of it.

As an antidote I’m exploring how I might cultivate equanimity in my publishing practice and in life in general. It seems to me that if we foster a worldview broad enough to see the blessings of failure—not just “looking at the bright side” but actually living into whatever invitations present themselves—and deep enough to be unattached to success, we can walk the middle way.

I love how this Taoist parable unfolds, each event turning over to reveal a surprising alternative. Everything has creative potential, but that potential is almost never what we expect. For me, orienting my heart toward the bigger Story (not just whatever small story I want to share with readers but the larger unfolding of my life and our lives together and all of evolution) helps me remain engaged with whatever is coming alive, regardless of my small success or failure.

My admiration for that farmer keeps growing. I’m convinced that his practice of steadiness, an open heart, and receptivity is really the only way to freedom.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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A few months ago I spent a week digging around archives in Maschito, Italy, researching my Abereshe ancestors.  I haven’t had a chance to write their stories yet, which is why I’m super-excited about Diane Wilson visiting my spiritual memoir drop-in session this Friday.  Diane is the author of SPIRIT CAR, her story of uncovering her Dakota ancestors and their involvement in the Dakota-U.S. war.  Please join us to dive into memoir that connects our ancestors’ lives to our own!

Second Fridays, 1:30-3:30 p.m.:  Wisdom Ways Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions.

March 8: All My Relations, with guest author Diane Wilson


April 12: Parts in the Whole: Form


May 10: Childhood, Revisited


June 14: Community and Revision

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Consenting to the Cold

Yesterday, watching dozens of bundled children careen down the sledding hill toward the creek, I had a pure Minnesota Moment. Big, heavy flakes filled the air; the kids were exuberant, flying over the jump, then trudging back up through deep powder; every so often some fat tire bikers passed by over the frozen creek bed; I felt how fortunate we all were to have hefty snowsuits, parents included, and wool socks and the fortitude to be glorying outdoors.

Eleven degrees and a snowstorm seem balmy only after a stretch of truly hard cold. In the past two weeks Minneapolis has had five school release days; when frostbite sets in after ten minutes and an inch of sheer ice on the roads delays buses over an hour, canceling school is the only option. We’ve been cooped up. Parents try to juggle work and childcare, kids climb the walls, and all of us long for routine. No wonder we’re willing to slide face-first at high speeds into the freezing snow. At least we can!

Minnesota winters are an exercise of consent. If you live where the weather’s always balmy, you never have to practice waking up in the morning and accepting that circumstances beyond your control have utterly altered your plans. Of course accidents and illnesses and death offer everyone this opportunity—life throws curve balls; that’s just how it goes. But Minnesota cold is a collective curve ball. We trundle through it together.

What’s hardest about not carrying on as usual is having our agenda interrupted and being helpless to do anything about it. Much as we might want the kids to go to school, they aren’t. Much as we might want our meeting to happen, it won’t. Our will is thwarted. As a result we have three choices: We can be miserable and rail against circumstances; we can go limp with resignation and feel victimized by our circumstances; or we can consent. Consent accepts what is with agency. Thomas Keating says “the chief act of the will is not effort but consent.” This is a wildly challenging notion, I think. The most powerful, willful action springs from acceptance.

In Minnesotan terms, we take the “bad” weather and make the best of it. On the drive home from sledding, the golf course parking lot was packed with more cars than I’ve ever seen there—all the skiers out for the first good conditions of the season. And I promise you, every one of them was joyful.

–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

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Winter is a great time to write!  Join me for Wisdom Ways Spiritual Memoir drop-in sessions on Second Fridays, 1:30-3:30 p.m.  I’m especially excited to talk with memoirist Diane Wilson on March 8th.  We’ll discuss her book Spirit Car, share thoughts on writing our ancestors’ stories in relation to our own, and offer writing exercises to practice this work.  Please join us!

Also upcoming:

April 12: Parts in the Whole: Form

May 10: Childhood, Revisited

June 14: Community and Revision

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