It chooses you

Yesterday, before visiting my mother, I went outside and I lay down on the dry grass in the blazing sun and I let the earth take me. I let go of protectively holding my weight off the ground. I let go of concerns about little ants and spiders creeping into my hair. I let my spine sink and the backs of my arms and my head fall heavily into the embrace of the earth - and I let the sun burn into me.Yesterday with my mother was hard. Really hard. Hardy hard hard. Mostly it's hard because I am watching my mother try, valiantly and deliberately, to die.. and I am watching her friend and caretaker try, just as hard, to hold onto her.And me in the middle, advocating for everyone - so hard.And today, I woke up with a headache and upset tummy. So I've been practicing gentle self-care. Lying around on the little sofa that my daughter moved into my sunroom during the first phase of the great house reorganization.I was perusing a website when I noticed the cover of a book in the sidebar."It choses you."Great title, I thought, before clicking away.An hour or so later, on another site, I was watching a video about "The Conscious Booksmith," an online class, when the camera did a slow pan of the author's bookshelf.And there was that book again."It Chooses You"I stopped the video. Moved the little triangle-thingy backwards so I could be sure. And ... yup."It Chooses You" was there, stacked in a pile.The title felt familiar and alluring, as if I'd only just realized it was etched on the inside of my eyelids. As if, finally, I'd found the reflection of something inside of me - on the outside of me.So, anyway, you know how this works: Something clicked.And I wrote down the title on the page of my notebook where I'd already captured several other 'things that felt important' during my dreamy 2-hour web-surf.It was around that time that I began to realize I was looking for something - some diamond-shaped piece of myself lost in the sand - which I probably should - no, absolutely must - retrieve.... before I can be whole.... before I can separate from my mother's story long enough to be in my own.... before I can finish this project I should be working on.And after a while, all of this began to wear on me and feelings and hard truths bubbled up up up up. Or so I thought - but a lot of them were just self-abuse. Just unkindness.So I asked them to leave, and I reached out to my shaman and my sister and some friends in an online circle- and this new psychotherapist my friend adores.And then, just now, while lying on the sofa with tears leaking out the sides of my eyes and wetting the purple velvet pillow behind my head, that title reminded me of itself.And I thought - oh. I see. It's choosing me.So I got up and Googled it.And as it turns out, this little book was written by Miranda July, one of my daughter's favorite writer/filmmakers. Which didn't surprise me one bit. These things have a way of weaving themselves into webs, don't they?Webs of "Oh, of course," and "I knew it!" which are, perhaps, not webs being woven so much as veils being lifted.But anyway...I got up, leaving my cheeks wet in that dramatic and self-nurturing way that I like, and I opened the door of the bookcase where my daughter - just last week - had mixed a pile of her favorite books into mine.And there it was.And I carried it back to the sofa in my sun room- and I lay back on the purple pillowand I opened the book.And on the second page,I found these lines,which were pretty and precise and the perfect description of where I am right now.So I'm sharing them with you.-----------From Miranda July: "It Chooses You"

I was writing a screenplay in the little house. I wrote it at the kitchen table, or in my old bed with its thrift store sheets. Or, as anyone who has tried to write anything recently knows, these are the places where I set the stage for writing but instead looked things up online. Some of this could be justified because one of the characters in my screenplay was also trying to make something, a dance, but instead of dancing, she looked up dances on YouTube. So, in a way, this procrastination was research. As if I didn't already know how it felt: like watching myself drift out to sea, too captivated by the waves to call for help..."...The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving flags on the balcony; all I had to do was walk across a field to get to them. But all of a sudden I was very, very sleepy. And the children couldn't believe their eyes as I folded down to my knees and fell to the ground face-first, with my eyes open. Motionless, I watched ants hurry in and out of a hill and I knew that standing up again would be a thousand times harder than the dragon or the swamp and so I did not even try. I just clicked on one thing after another after another."....

Afterword:As I pressed send on this post, my husband delivered a package which had just arrived in the mail for me. Inside, I found a beautiful feather made of glass - a gift from a client/student, a Soul Caller - divinely timed to land straight in my heart.What a beautiful world we live in, a world that can do things like this!