Held by Earth, Air, Fire & Water - No Matter What, #365StrongStories 52

Thanks to taxes and a toddler, I’m working on three hours of sleep. It’s like being underwater and floating in the air and mired in mud and burning with delirium all at once.

When I put it that way, it almost sounds like a spiritual experience.

I’ve roamed across faiths and devotional practices for half my life. Finally, I’ve found myself in the hinterlands between the Catholicism of my childhood and the Mother Goddess dirt worship that I’ve picked up during the quest. Ultimately, my home is made at the crossroads. You might choose to see this as a symbol of the cross. But I’ve never found much solace or inspiration in that part of the Christ story. Give me a divine birth and miraculous healings, please. Give me the goddesses who guide the travelers’ way.

North, east, south, and west and the elements that resonate with each - that is where I always come back to. It’s the very essence of being alive as I understand it.

The earth is our very bones. The air is breath in our lungs. The fire is the spark of movement. And the water all the sweat, the tears, and the blood that wash us full of life.

In these years of mothering young children when I feel almost perpetually off balance with exhaustion and a poorly tended body and soul, I would tell you I’d lost track of these elemental marks of aliveness.

But as I drown and float and burn and feel so stuck, It seems that nothing could be further from the truth. Even when I’m sleepwalking through a Sunday, I’m held by these forces, by the energies that compel this world, these bodies, the collective spirit.

We're losers. We're divine. We're bizarre. We're boring., #365StrongStories 51

“Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.” I wasn’t the only one! When I heard this John Lennon quote sometime in my sophomore year of high school I was relieved to know that at least one other person lived the same sort of split existence. (And yes, this deepened the Beatles crush - even if it was 30 years late.)

Turns out, John and I don’t share some secret bond across time and space.

Unless you’ve reached enlightenment, every human on the planet suffers from some sort of epic inner conflict. And though “I’m brilliant! I’m shit!” is one of the more common examples, this sort of double consciousness cracks our psyches in all sorts of ways.

Columbia University graduate non-fiction program chair Phillip Lopate sees another brutal internal split that silences storytellers before they even begin. As he says:

The fledgling personal writer may be torn between two contrasting extremes:

a: “I am so weird that I could never tell on the page what is really secretly going on in my mind.”

b: “I am so boring, nothing ever happens to me out of the ordinary, so who would want to read about me?”

Both extremes are rooted in shame, and both reflect a lack of worldliness.

I’d love to say that I’ve outgrown my fraud/goddess complex, but I admit I’m still a human stuck in the middle. I also must admit that I still worry that my stories are too bizarre or hausfrau dull.

But somehow, I’ve learned to be grateful to my dualities - even when shifting between the poles makes me feel seasick. All my contradictions are turning out to be essential to telling a year’s worth of stories…

So the bad news is that we’re all embroiled in inner conflict. The good news is that we’re not alone. Please share one of your creative conflicts in the comments or tag me when you share a strong story about one of your contradictions!

Doubt and Annie D. by guest storyteller Suzi Banks Baum, #365StrongStories 50

I wake up almost every morning happy. I crank open my eyes to assess the weather, then turn to my prayer practice.  I tug on wool socks, light a candle because Rumi says, "learn to light the candle." I close my eyes again. This seals the deal on my internal climate. I can handle calamity. Though I have ridden out usual mothering storms and some complicated travails, today's stratospheric turmoil has rocked me. Caused solely by my college-aged son, who'd just spent 18 hours with us, who left at 7:30 AM because he wanted to get back to school to the library. Here I am, saying goodbye, again. He is not off to the military, not off to the fields. He is not off to the hunting grounds or climbing on to a horse or a camel or a tank. He is getting in to his little car and taking his clean laundry and going back to school. But my heart cracks anyway, because wherever the destination, it is away and that changes me.

So I find myself in a curiously quiet house, no alternate sound track running in another room. The girl child is off on an arctic adventure in Manhattan. After 22 years of being accompanied, I am alone. They will be back; this nest is not cleaned out and orderly after the upheaving of babies, toddlers, or teens.

But look who has moved in! Doubt, the cold sister of possibility, has already chosen her bedroom. She chimes in before it is her turn to talk. She tugs away my equanimity and questions every choice. She loves to dangle the "who do you think you are" banner across my daylight. She glories in my prolonged dithering.

Then, Annie Dillard shows up:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

There is a bootstrap and I will pull it up today. I know what it feels like to show up blind with love, daring to move forward, even when I don't want to, even when Doubt casts her pallor over my day. I have 22 years of experience showing up for two people. Some days, I did not feel like oatmeal or elastic waist jeans pulled over thick-diapered bottoms, but I got them on anyway. Oats and jeans. Doubt. Take a seat. Take a number. Get in line.

Daring and love snuck in and I have work to do.

Suzi is an artist, actress, writer, teacher, community organizer, and mom. She’s passionate about helping women find their creative voice and live focused, joy-filled lives.

Curious? Go to  SuziBanksBaum.com. 

No, you can't have chocolate with your whine. Mama can. #365StrongStories 49

There comes a moment in every child’s life when she stands at the top of the stairs crying “mommy, I need you!” It will be thirty years before she understands what mama is really doing when she calls, “Yes, darling, I know. Let me just get your cough medicine!”

Mother is actually going for a mouthful of Cadbury chocolate and a slug of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Good night, dear.

Corporate Lawyers Who Do Our Emotional Heavy Lifting, #365StrongStories 48

Will they ever find out that Mike is a fraud? No, not Mike my husband. I’m talking about Mike Ross, attorney at Pearson, etc.

I really worry about Mike, even though he’s not real. Actually, I worry about him because he’s not real. There’s almost no plausible scenario that would put us in the same circles. No, I only care about him because some screenwriter got the formula just right.

My husband and I owe a great Mike and his colleagues on Suits. Over the last few months, their high stakes corporate takeovers, epic spats, and captivating wardrobe choices have been like a trip to the spa (even better than “mudding”). Because absolutely no one on the show has children, it packs an even more satisfying escapist punch than Game of Thrones.

But then, there was the episode we watched last night - dead parents, infidelity, professional betrayal, fear of being alone, Catholic guilt, and being found out as a fraud. Messy, human stuff that you couldn’t tune out after a five-season investment. So much for escape!

This is what stories are supposed to do, you see. They’re supposed to be addictive excursions that open us to experience terrible, wonderful, tantalizing things. When the fear and pleasure centers are triggered, the brain honestly doesn’t know the difference between fiction and reality. That's why stories make us care and cry and even change the way we think.

And the ending of this particular episode was devastating. Usually, of course, autoplay would do its magic and we’d only teeter on the cliffhanger edge for a few moments. But it was a Tuesday night, and husband was feeling strong and virtuous, so he clicked the TV off.

Here's the thing about story addiction: when you don’t get your next hit, you just might have to feel something for a while.

Both of us sat there staring at the blank screen willing the clock backward so we could dive deep into this pinstripe sea and put off real life for another 44 minutes. In this silence, I felt the swell of unbidden emotions. My husband sensed the rush within me - it’s quite easy to hear your partner’s ragged breath when it’s not competing with “Previously, on Suits…”

All those lawyer problems had triggered my own doubts and fears, and though the details are as different as a Hyundai and a Bentley, the pain was universal enough.

In this binge watching culture, we’ve denied ourselves access to the real power of all these stories. We revel of the abundance of “more good TV than one could watch and still have a job!” and deny ourselves the divinely unsatiated state when we see just enough to feel something real.