Getting clear….
Dearest Nancy:
As you know, I’m behind on writing you, and I’m sorry for that, as I’ve missed these pages and missed you and this exchange of words that I have come to value so much. But as a friend said of herself this week, she can so often collapse during a time away, so oblivious has she been to the stress that has piled up over the weeks that preceded an illness. I’ve been away on spring break and have been ailing with a little kid illness. Tonsils inflamed and sleeping and watching mindless television and also, as you said in your last letter, feeling a bit unmoored and displaced. Your unsettledness was from falling trees and a house damaged from a winter storm.
My unmooredness has been inside myself, as it tends to be, and in the midst of this time of being sick and having to be still, I decided to clean out my own closet. What I purged wasn’t clothes and coats and pocketbooks and knitted hats, but some clutter I’ve carried around for months and maybe longer, nonetheless. My internal clutter, I realize, has many names. I’ve been corresponding with a group of women friends about feeling shame, and I am certain that this is one huge part of the clutter in my psychic life. The same old, same old. Leaving my job. Leaving the professional life I’d made for myself because I knew it was the wrong life for me, and because I knew at last that I could not change the life I had chosen in a way I could live with. Regardless of my decision and my resolve, I felt and feel shame. It’s as if I have turned in my sweatshirt that identifies me as a teacher of writing and therefore as a writer somehow, and I’m now standing here, naked and unlabeled, unsure of who I am, unsure of how others see me.
But if I sweep that clutter aside, what’s next in the housecleaning of myself? The other, usuals. I am less than, hillbilly that I am. Mountain girl and brought up to be umble, as my granny called it, and therefore afraid of the sound her own voice makes when it resonates a little too loud across a room. And look at these hands. A star-shaped scar across the top of my right hand. Thumbnails damaged, years back, via fungi from the acres of plants I’ve pinched back, in my greenhouse worker days. Worker me? Ah, that. Is what I say in a classroom full of eager faces smart enough? Smart enough. Strong enough. Too strong. A bundle of everything about how I see myself. Bundle of worries, untie yourself. Clutter, be gone.
Once I’d laid in bed and taken my antibiotics, once I’d fretted and de-cluttered some, once I’d written you part of this letter and let it sit awhile, I re-read what I’d written and, if you believe it, the same thing happened to me that happened to you. Something was missing. For you, it was a booklet full of passwords and, as you say, you quickly realized you’d given the booklet away to a thrift store, the one where you raced back to search pockets and unzip zippers. For me, the missing thing in all my internal clutter was the strength at the center of my own self. The thing I must come back to, every time, when I doubt myself as writer, as teacher, as a woman, as me.
This morning as I lay about, still recovering from my little kid tonsil sickness, I started reading passages from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a book I come back to again and again when I need clarity about my writing life. This passage felt the most right. “Don’t expect any understanding,” Rilke says, “but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
Love? Is that the core of it all? Of words and me and world and worry, of publishing and readings and conferencing, of teaching and conveying what I mean, of all of it, this Writing Life. Back in the day, when I was at the job I left, I work-shopped by looking, as I called it, for the heart of the work. By this, I mean the key, the part of the story or the essay that held the power, the truth that needed to be surfaced, built upon. Craft, yes. Certainly that. But what were the intentions of the work at hand? What was the heart of the matter? Students reacted to this method of critiquing in a variety of ways, but often, in there, was doubt. The heart? That silly business? Surely the heart is sentiment, is earnest, yes, but is it the serious business of language?
“Don’t forget that one,” the guy at the thrift store told you, and you checked one last place, the zipper you always forgot on that one bag. And there it was! Your booklet. There it was for me today, a center of what it is I do. Love. But was love enough? Can compassion teach anyone anything? Love does not obfuscate hurt, fear, doubt. Nor uncertainty. Love? Not love for any one person or place or thing, but it is a center I am choosing. And love can mean we can lose everything, that we often must and will lose everything.
For me, growth does not always occur in the comfort zone. It sometimes pushes us into places that feel uncomfortable. That is where I found myself this week as I let myself rest and get well, heal even as I uncluttered my interior world. It is not a comfortable place, this knowledge of self. I am left, at the end of my days of uncluttering, with as much fear and trembling as I began with. And I’m okay with that.
Yours with love,
Karen
