Dear Starlight,
I am a commitment to Joy and Courage. I write this daily in my journal—as statement and action. Yet as I write it, it sounds like a question. The word “courage” rises in tenor at the end, with an invisible question mark.
How am I enacting my commitment today?
Lately, life has been wringing this question from me. As if the hands of god are gripping my head and feet dangling me over paradise and twisting until I scream: MERCY! Mercy, motherfucker, mercy!
Thursday I drove over lush green mountains, my husband beside me. His questions—about dinner, about groceries—innocent but revolting.
I came to Vermont to write. To create. To be quiet. A dream I claimed for myself, grabbed it from the sky as it flitted past my imagination a few months back. But. I am struggling to believe I deserve it. So, I am busy with kitchen utensils and my mind says: be good. Be generous. My body says: No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I thought I'd feel calm here. Instead, I scan for disaster to prove I shouldn’t be here. I don’t dream—I crash planes in nightmares and the brook dries under my feet leaving me parched eternally.
A breakthrough came Thursday, I felt dizzy. I couldn’t breathe. My larynx locked around a stone of calcified words rising from somewhere deep; an ancestral well. I told my husband my truth through babbling hot tears on burning cheeks:
This isn’t the family home that hustles and bustles with stuff. This is a sanctuary. A temple. A new beginning. A place to meet the artist in me, alone. I need to be alone here. This is a place to hold solitude
A fissure opened.
I don’t know if it will widen into flow or seal shut again.
I should wear a sign around my neck: Volcanic eruptions can occur at any time.
There is magma in me.
—
I once dreamed the dreams handed to me: house, husband, motherhood, career. They weren’t mine. They were carrots in the woman's corral. Sweet ideas illustrated in every handbook of ‘How to be and live good”. I was raised to serve someone else’s dream. Cheap labor for the economy of the man’s world.
Waking up from that spell—halfway through your life—is….what’s the word? Uneasy.
I cannot deny my need for solitude anymore. For so long, I didn’t even see it. Then, I couldn’t accept it.
What if the need for solitude is not even tied to an artistic outcome? I hear myself say: I need to be alone so I can write…yes, true… but what if I just need to be alone so I can breathe?
Courage isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes, it’s naming what you want. Sometimes it’s letting the world you’ve built catch fire while you spew flying lava and leap toward what’s true,
Today, my husband is leaving–going back home to our home-home, and I’ll be here alone for the next week or so.
I don’t know how I’ll feel.
If I had to name it? Uneasy.
But committed.
I feel this so much. I hope your time to/with yourself is healing. I’m in Vermont on a family vacation (which has turned into a family funeral) and I am craving alone time. It feels like a place where you are meant to be alone.