Words as Steps on a Path

I am still ruminating about the changes I have undergone in the last 20 years. One thing is that I am not reading as much literature, specifically environmental literature, as I used to. Just tonight I began thumbing through some of my old books and reading all the parts I have underlined. Some old emotions were stirred and I felt the pulse of passion in my veins. I think I need to read more. More essays, more poetry, more philosophy. I think I need to re-read some of those authors that inspired me long ago: Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold, Gary Snyder and Annie Dillard. But I am frustrated because I feel like I have so little time--I can barely find time to work on my dissertation, let alone read books from my past. Yet at the same time, it might be one of the things that saves me. Maybe taking time to get reaquainted to some of these mentors will energize me to finish my degree. We'll see.

I'll end with some words from Terry Tempest Williams, in her remarkable essay "Undressing the Bear" found in her book titled "An Unspoken Hunger." She writes: "if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories."

In my need of emotional healing it is time to reconnect to the stories that once sustained me. I think this will help me find my voice again. And once I have found my voice I can act from the heart again. This feels right to me, like an important step on the journey to relearning happiness.

Full of beans

Christina left a comment on my post "Where is the Passion?" which summed up what I've been thinking about over the last hour. And to prove I'm not always whiny, and to show what an emotional see-saw I ride, I decided I needed to write a response to my own post.

I do still have passion, I'm just not 20 anymore and I have a lot more responsibilities than I did when I was 20. So my passion looks different, at least the way I vocalize and think about those things I love looks different. I still love to read poetry and feel the sun on my face. I think about the people of the Maldive Islands, who will lose their islands due to climate change, every time I get in a car. My understanding of environmental issues has deepened but I don't have the freedom of time to go flitting off to DC to protect wilderness like I did when I was 20. As a 40-something mother of 3, working on a PhD and running a household, my energy for my passions has had to diffuse to more things. And I now have 3 individual passions that take up way more energy to maintain than any whale ever did. We have 20 year olds in our society to be the passionate, tireless souls that they are, because at 40 we are tired and have to keep the rest of life moving! So, I'm glad I'm a 40 year old woman who struggles to keep her passions alive. And if nothing else, I can say, like Mary Oliver did--I'm still full of beans! This blog is evidence of it.

Where is the Passion?

I miss my 20 year old self. I miss the passion I felt for so many things. I felt so strongly about the environment, teaching, reading, poetry, writing, ecofeminism, learning . . . I was driven to think and discuss ideas, all the time. Now, although I still believe in and love those things, I've lost my passion. This recognition has come about because I came across a fantastic new blog called "Our Mother's Keeper" which is a "LDS group blog dedicated to environmentalism, ecofeminism and environmental justice issues that result from the changes the planet is currently undergoing." It's brilliant and everything I wished I had 20 years ago. It looks like it's a forum handcrafted for me; yet I find myself feeling like it's a place where I don't belong, because I've settled in my middle class life and can't find the passion to share my ideas and ideals any more. I have misplaced the "ecofreak" (a term of endearment from my father). I'm not sure anyone would look at me and think I was an ecofreak today. That saddens me.

The depression is not the culprit of this loss of passion, because I was depressed when I was 20. I was depressed and passionate. There's a great line from a poem called "Self Portrait" by Mary Oliver (yes, more from Mary; isn't it obvious that I've just recently found her work?). Its opening line is:

I wish I was twenty and in love with life
and still full of beans.

I think that's so awesome. The best part about it is the ending line:

though I'm not twenty
and won't be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.

My sorrow comes from the fact that I'm forty (and then some) but I'm not sure I'm still in love with life. What has happened to that idealist who cried at the site of ORV tracks across the desert; who signed petitions and lobbied at Capitol Hill for the sake of the voiceless, for the sake of the earth? Where is the idealist who wanted to save the whales and the plants and went out of her way to not step on cryptogamic soil? Maybe I'm remembering myself wrong, maybe I never really was any of those things. Maybe my passion wasn't as deep-rooted as I thought it was. But maybe I'm right. If I am right, then the passion still must be there, somewhere, lying in wait, on slow burn, waiting to be reignited. I hope so, I hope I can revive that passionate, younger self. If nothing else, it's a good sign that I can remember that young self and I have desire and hope to find her. At least it's a start.

The Mood-Thought Paradox

I'm sitting here struggling with trying to figure out what I'm feeling and what to write. I should be working on the dissertation, but, c'est la vie. I am beginning to have days where I fall in and out of confidence. It's a very tiring way to live, but at least I am having moments of feeling confident. However, I'm realizing that I can only sustain those positive emotions for several hours, then I'm back to feeling like my life is useless. Like I said, it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just leaves me feeling confused. It feels like I'm in a car that's stuttering around--one moment it runs smoothly, the next it chokes or stalls out.

What is most interesting about this to me is that when I'm feeling good, I really believe any positive self-talk I present to myself. But when I'm feeling bad, I cannot believe the positive ideas or phrases and only the negative one feel real. This is quite a quandary to be in because I have yet to be able to identify any causal relationship between my moods, up or down, and I'm left feeling out of control of my emotional state of mind. It's not like I can say to myself "just whistle a happy tune and you'll feel good" or "think happy thoughts." My mood and my thoughts seem to be intertwined and I can't find where one begins and one ends. When I'm feeling okay I can believe that I am enough, just as is. But when I slip down then that thought seems like a cruel joke. It's all rather frustrating.

Riptides

Well, I received some professional critique last night and words like "rather alarming" and "unacceptable" were thrown around. I am not in a strong enough place to handle this. Over the last year and a half or so, it feels like every time I make any progress towards completing this damnable degree something or someone pulls the rug out from under me. Then I have to spend another week, or month, and get myself back up and going again. It really sucks. I had just come off a high--getting my first chapter of the dissertation finished, polished, and sent off for review for publication. I was feeling "normal," which for me is pretty good and now this. It's like my depression is sitting right in the center of my chest and it's all I can do to keep it down. And when something like this happens, it's all I can do to not absolutely loose faith in myself.

This all begs the question of what to do? The Western philosophy is that life is a battle that needs to be conquered; everything is a struggle and you fight until you win. Like my dad always said "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and never give up. The Eastern philosophy suggests that life is more of an inner struggle to learn to give up the self to the larger universe. Fighting is useless and puts you further behind, whereas giving yourself over to the higher power or some such thing ultimately brings out one's strengths. In church the other day someone used an analogy of a bush being pruned by a gardener. The bush asks why it must be pruned and the gardener answers that he's making the bush into what he wants it to be, with the analogy that we are the bush and God is the gardener and we should subject ourselves to the pruning (i.e. difficulties in life) to become all that we can be. It makes me wonder if I'm just kicking against the pricks or am I in the refiners fire? Is this all part of the struggle that makes me stronger or is the real lesson to be learned is that I should stop fighting something that is unbeatable and am I travelling down the wrong road? It's kind of like trying to get out of a riptide--instead of wasting your energy swimming against the current, you must let the tide take you out to the ocean and then get to a point where you can swim back, going with the flow rather than against it. So am I in a riptide? It feels like if I quite swimming, or dog-paddling as the case may be, that I will drown. I just don't know how to interpret the challenges I've faced over the last year and then some. But I'm afraid to make a decision because I'm not in a place of strength. My decision would most likely be made from a place of fear and insecurities. And that won't work. I'm just really tired of fighting in general. I'm ready to throw in the towel.

I apologize for some of the metaphors I'm using and mixing. They sound a bit trite and lacking in useful insights, but I'm tired and trying to make sense of things I don't really understand. So this blog is more like vomiting up my feelings, rather than being a meaningful essay of self-reflection.