Is This Crazy Contraption Seriously Going to Work?

This is a series of essays that have not appeared before on this blog. They were taken from my book, Surrendering to Joy, which I wrote in the year immediately following my daughter Teal’s death in 2012.

See if this sounds familiar.

You write a book, build a business, take a job or create something based on guidance, a hunch, or a screaming instinct that you have. You do it because you know – you really know – you are meant to do this thing.

But in the back of your mind there is also doubt. It feels squeamishly tender. You are scared, dammit! Do you seriously have to do this thing? Really?

This is where I find myself as I emerge from my grief.

I am a changed woman with a permanently changed offer to the world.

I’m talking about my writing. A book is slowly accumulating steam, patiently biding its time. It seems to be lodged somewhere in my veins, waiting for the moment when I’ll open one and write.

One rule of the Universe I know by heart is that if I’m not clear on my transformation – and I can honestly stand behind its value – no one will be. I must own the power of this emerging work down to my toes.

And like anyone facing their deepest truth, I’m scared. It’s not that I fear I can’t sell a book or make my living from this work; I’ve proven in the past I can do that. It’s more that I fear the tender, deeply vulnerable rightness of this work, and the place I have to go to produce it.

I fear the raw power of what I experience every time I sit down and put my hand in that flame.

It’s as if every step of my life has prepared me for this point. From my days studying art history and learning how to really look at things and write about them, to my stints as copywriter, failed novelist, and guided self-help author the first time around.

Yet, it is mostly Teal’s death that has prepared me for this work. From the moment I stood looking at her stretched out before me on the hospital bed, encased in tubes, wires and monitors, I knew the moment had come.

I knew she would die and that I would be forced to be reborn. I knew the truth was finally going to have its way and, for once, I could not stop it. Like all of us at that moment of truth, I was ripped wide open and all the falsehoods in my life were wiped clean at once.

This burning away is a process we all must succumb to one way or another. Perhaps it happens through the end of a marriage or the loss of a job. Maybe it happens with the death of a parent, a serious illness, or the bottoming out of an addiction that has to end.

Sooner or later, all of us must fall off the apple wagon of our own pretensions and dissolve into the nothingness that God requires. To fight it is nothing less than pure folly.

We are transient beings on this planet and we are here for one purpose alone – to experience our own sweet, tender fragility and gain strength in its expression.

We have to know this truth and surrender to it fully, letting it show us the way.

Most of all, we have to trust the deep and lasting value of what is born anew. It’s the old “Sally Field problem” – we are being called to know our value in the world.

Yet somehow we are wired for complete denial of that fact. When Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel, he wrote in his diary, “I am no painter!” Mark Twain wrote of his classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “I may very well pigeonhole it or even burn it.”

Our reticence around our truth turns out to be quite normal. And I have to just keep reminding myself of this fact as I cycle back down to writing once again.

There is always perfection in God’s plan for us. You can trust it and so can I. We may feel overly sensitive along the way, but that is how it is to be stretched as we grow.

All that is required, ultimately, is our willingness. Are we willing to surrender and “face the music” of our own discontent? Can we allow ourselves to find the path back to our deeper truth, our purest voice?

I, for one, can only say yes. How about you?

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Reprinted from my book, Surrendering to Joy .

 

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