Fallow Fields Redoux - only this time it is different

I have to laugh at myself because I easily, so easily, forget the lessons I have already learned. Does that happen to you? I've often called this tendency of mine "the spiral staircase" and the point of that is that life is a cycle, but it is not a flat cycle, it is an ascending and descending cycle, and we can, by our choices, go either way. Very rarely do we end up exactly at the same point, but rather at a similar point or in a similar situation.

For me January and February seem to be hard, my body seems to resonate with a deep loss. Last year at this time, I had a miscarriage. Four years ago a custody battle with my ex-husband started and I was afraid I would lose my children. Five years ago at this time, my first marriage finally fell apart. Ten years ago, my ex-husband did the unthinkable to me and hit me while I was pregnant with our son and I was afraid my marriage would never get better. Twenty-four years ago, my ex-husband hit me for the first time. Nearly thirty years ago, I was date raped and my naïveté was lost. It goes on and on, and between these big years is a re-visitation of those losses of the past sneaking up on me strangely, or setting me up for the next big loss. Some years seem like a piece of cake in comparison, but I have a reckoning with loss and confronting expectations. It appears this is a life pattern worth recognizing. I must allow this mourning to unfold or life will hand me a big grievance to deal with and I feel this in my body more than my brain. My brain forgets to pay attention, honestly, but this year it is different.

This year is the first year that I've appreciated this pattern. I can see it so clearly today, that I'm actually shocked at its precision. It begs the question: What am I holding onto with expectation that will tear away from me in one way or another? What expectation can I confront consciously, be aware of and release before the big bad Universe comes to collect it? That sounds like fear mongering I realize, but it really isn't that at all.  It is an effort to become cognizant of false hope, to comprehend my own fantasies.

I rush to sit in my fallow fields before I'm forced there by unforeseen circumstances! Yes, the fields are still frozen solid. However, as I sit here, I remember that I'm not going to plant saplings right now. I'm going to grow my writing career from seeds, from peach pits. That is a completely different scenario from trying to grow a writing career from an already mature pattern. Oh yeah. Peach pits. I don't have to dig huge holes on the hill of my orchard. I have to wait for perfect timing, the last frost which may be months away, and spend my time instead shoring up other parts of my life...like finances, for instance. Is it pure, unadulterated fantasy to believe that I can plant peach saplings in the frozen dead of winter? The expectation that I can be dependent on a frozen budget that has no give is a clue.

For the last 23 years, I have been avoiding writing with my whole heart by taking on work to support my wasband, my children, and myself. I easily buy into making a success of other people’s projects. It is harder for me to invest this time in my own success, knowing that everyone I care about has to live with less while I am after it. My dear, sweet husband will not make the decision for me about whether or not to take finding another job seriously, no matter how I beg him to make up my mind. The guilt and shame of my fallow field rises daily as he works overtime to make ends meet while I struggle to write from seeds. I cannot explain in words how excruciating this dependency feels. Yet, he has faith in my writing, he believes that the peach orchard will grow if I just focus there, and sacrifice now the comforts of financial gain. How strange to have someone else have faith in my writing, when I second-guess it everyday. To find my patience is truly my spiritual lesson. We are not starving. We have, in general, necessities cared for, but no extras; no progress can be made today, right now. If, as I sit on the frozen, fallow field, I could locate patience then perhaps the field would thaw. 

Chapter Nine - Part Two - The Last Stair

When I was a kid, my bedroom was in the basement of this very clever house that my dad had designed for us. The logic of the basement bedrooms was all about Colorado. You see, a basement in a Colorado house will stay warm in the winter and cold in the summer. My dad, an exceedingly practical and green-ahead-of-his-time architect, reasoned that the bedrooms were the most important rooms to have "climate control" over. My mother tried to make the basement cheerful by putting this hideous red and orange shag carpeting down there. Little did they know the effect of those decisions on a 7-year old girl.

Since I had no religious training, I had only the vaguest notions of heaven and hell. For me, hell was down there...in the basement...alone. My parents were social creatures and I often had babysitters, so I had lots of opportunities to be in hell...in the basement...alone. I couldn't even turn on the light to dispel my fears before I arrived until I'd arrived. I clearly remember standing on the stairs of that brand new house, bracing myself for the step into the dark. That moment before I could reach the light switch was the most heart-pounding moment that ever existed for me.

I feel a bit like I've been standing on the stairs of my life for a long time now. I do have the feeling more and more that once I step off the stairs and flip on the light that everything will turn out all right. It always did in the basement. I'm still alive. Neither Alferd Packer nor Baby Doe Tabor (the ghostly spooks that grabbed my childhood heart) have eaten me alive. I have since befriended many, many spiders.

It's that moment in the dark, standing on the maniacal red shag carpeting, wondering what I would find when the light went on that hangs around my shoulders. It was literally a nano second of time in my childhood day. What if...the light bulb is burned out? How do I face this darkness that hangs in front of me at the bottom of the stairs?

In my life, in my field, a dark night has been hanging in front of me. One might even say that I've been in it, in the dark moment, for years, unable to reach the light switch for some reason, paralysed by fear. Well, as it repeated itself daily in my childhood, it has been cyclical in my adult life. I was on the last stair for years about ending my abusive marriage. It seems a little insane from the other side. When I finally stepped into the darkness, and even when my worst fears were trumped by real life suffering, I survived it all, and found myself in a warm snuggly bed.

What did I depend on nightly to get off that last stair and touch the freaky carpeting with my bare feet? Determination. I became angry at fear itself for keeping me from my warm bed and inviting the ridicule of my parents. Remembering peace. I imagined how the basement would be with my dad watching TV in his bedroom, and all the lights on. Faith. I came to believe that there was nothing really there to harm me even if I felt afraid. The more faith I had the less fear I felt on the last stair. Relief. As I grew, the fear disappeared so completely that I could laugh at the unreasonableness of it with a sense of relief that has never left me.

Episode Nine

I have faith in myself and the process I am going through. Faith is such an interesting concept because it suggests “blind” without saying so. I would suggest that faith requires careful observation and is not blind at all. Having faith in oneself is easy when everything is progressing apparently, and much more difficult when at a stuck place, but having faith at the stuck place is the more important expression of faith.

I really appreciate the Biblical story of Job. I like the double-entendre of “Job” and “job”. It is a story about faith at its roots and it is a story about the work faith is when the job isn’t easy. Job is plagued with challenges and well-intentioned advice for many years. He appears to lose everything that he appears to value except his faith that it is all part of the life he is meant to have and that he will survive the consequences by living with integrity, honor and honesty. He has faith in God to see him through it all. There is nothing that can shake his belief that LIFE LOVES HIM, and that drives the fallen angel Lucifer mad.

Having had some apparently good times, prosperous times, abundant times and having experienced the worst of times, loss so painful I thought it might kill me, and true worry for the basic necessities of life, I can say with courage that I have faith in myself and the process I am going through. I fully understand that another word for faith is job, and that means I have to work with whatever comes along with the belief that LIFE LOVES ME regardless of appearances. I have faith that it is all neutral in truth and that what’s good today may not look good tomorrow and has nothing to do with the real stuff of life, and vice versa.

Observation of a whole lifetime will make it clear that everything that happens balances out in the end. To me faith finally comes down to accepting that life is essentially neutral, neither good or bad wins out for anybody in the end UNLESS one can be grateful for the whole process of it. So then we'll leave this experience either feeling our faith was justified, or we'll leave this experience feeling that there was no reason to have faith. I'd choose the former over the latter any day.