Chapter Six - Part Two - Pesticide and Herbicide Recovery

If weeds and harmful bugs are the distractions that come into a writer's life, then pesticide and herbicide are the self-delusion that they can be controlled without any effort. I've experienced heavy use of self-delusion for years and years because I believed that I could do both -- I could change the world to suit my needs and I could maintain my innocence.

It is true that I am living in an area of the country that is crazy for organic farming, but that does not mean I have no sympathy for the crop duster farming of the mid-20th century. I really get it. This is the thing: I had a dear grand-uncle, Pretty Pa, who was a crop dustin' fool. He believed in the "green revolution" of his time, having lived through the dust bowl. He knew the value of creating a reliable source of food and cotton not just for his own pockets but also in developing nations that were plagued by famine and shortages because of pests of all kinds. He knew that the consumer didn't want worm-eaten apples, or rusty grapefruits, or weavel eaten cotton. He was highly successful as a farmer, until he went bankrupt because his business partner embezzled money. He died of cancer at age 72, and had his ashes spread across the fields of the Rio Grande Valley from a crop duster.

In my own life, I knew that no one, least of all me, wanted to acknowledge that there was something terribly wrong in my life. I chose to be "practical" and put aside my aspirations, or at the most give them the smallest fraction of my time and effort, in order to hold together the external picture of the life I thought everyone wanted to see in me. I thought I had the bugs and weeds pretty well concealed with my own form of pesticides and herbicides. My habits included work-aholism, always filling my home with guests, maintaining an optimist's point of view that it would all change for the better. After I split with my ex-husband, I had many friends come forward and admit to me that they were frightened or offended by the way he treated me in front of them. I was shocked! I had believed that I'd been alone in my perceptions. I only vaguely recalled one lone voice of a friend telling me that she didn't think that he was the right man for me. In fact, I sought out friends and therapists who would agree with me that the marriage could be saved rather than friends and therapists who could help me face reality.

What I suffered from was the idea that with mental pesticides and herbicides I had kept under wraps all the insidious bugs of domestic violence and distractions I was creating from the eyes of my consumers. If no one else could see it then it could be reduced and reduced until finally I had magically thought it away. What I created instead was a toxic, wiped out top soil where very little could grow anymore, and a lot of it could just blow away. And it did. I went bankrupt, I lost control over where I would live, and I nearly lost what was most important to me, my children. These experiences were not unshared, my ex-husband mirrored them in his own way, and frankly I don't think either one of us has fully recovered, but he has presented that external picture of recovery whereas I have refused to put forth the idea that all is resolved and I'm just fine.

In fact, I'm flabbergasted by the expectations of friends and family who believe that I should be plowing forward as if nothing had ever happened to me. Their impatience has caused me to isolate myself at times. It's not that I want to wallow in this field that has questionable top soil, too much water at times, and that I never want to plant anything again. It's just that I realize that rushing to fix it is what got me into the mess in the first place. It takes a thousand years to naturally replace one inch of top soil. Can the world give me a few years to get my bearings? I don't want to completely abandon myself in this moment when I might actually recover what I lost track of in the past.

On the other hand, I'm sure there are those who think I've rushed into my second marriage to fix my top soil. They would be wrong. My sweet husband is the most patient man on earth I think. He knows I'm broken, and loves me anyway. We don't put on airs that everything in our lives is hunky-dory. We're not investing in anything but learning to accept each other on our own terms. He's sacrificing having all sort of bachelor-style toys to support my growth, though he points out whenever I project my guilt onto him that he does nothing that he doesn't want to do, and I believe him. I am inspired to truly grow (from the inside out) in order to be there for him when he needs me should that ever happen. It's just a totally different scenario, and it isn't always comfortable for me because it means I can't project a perfect picture to friends and family who would prefer it.

In fact, it seems I am digging deeper and deeper into my own discomfort in order to finally truly arise. Like some deep-rooted weeds that mine the depths of the soil and bring up those minerals and nutrients to the surface, I have to watch the growth of my discomfort and nip it in the bud before it becomes a reproductive weed. Naturally a deep-rooted weed helps depleted soil in a way that nothing else can, so can discomfort point force me to recognize myself and heal. Only when I accept all of myself will I be writing from a greater Source, and delivering the greater message I know I am capable of delivering.

Chapter Six - Part One - Top Soil

Yesterday winds clocked over 70 miles an hour in my area, and so I looked up the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to understand how wind affects fields. It turns out that farmers lost 5 inches of top soil over most of the arable farmland in America during those terrible dry times. It takes 1,000 years to build one inch of top soil naturally. We know so much about soil composition now because of the hard times of the past, and so of course, we've built up the top soil once again in record time. There are farms. There are growing things.

Sometimes I feel like my adult life has been like a dust bowl. It blew away a lot of the natural goodness and now I am spending a lot of time painstakingly rebuilding the top soil of my life. It opens me up to criticism from some work-a-day people that I'm not doing enough. That hurts my heart because I generally put in a full 18 hours a day of constant work. I rarely sit with my family to play a game. I haven't had a vacation in five years. The pressure to produce is quite something to deal with when I know that I am still unprepared, and so I work to ready the soil by daily work.

Some of my work is housework. Some of my work is taking care of sick kids. Some of my work is cooking dinner for my exhausted husband. Some of my work is volunteering for the schools because I can't give them money right now. All of that work does double duty as a practice of consciousness, and I am in constant gratitude for the moments when I am fully occupied with tasks to be done. But, a hell of a lot of my work is dealing with waste inside my brain and turning it into fertilizer and compost for the top soil of my writing field.

Those empty moments when I deal with nothing but the memories of disappointment, and turning them into the gifts they are, by conscious shifts in perspective is the harder work. As a writer, I do this because my goal is to write about the process of life. It sometimes looks like I'm just walking the dog, or just putting quotes up on Facebook, but I assure you at the end of the day I've contemplated my work and know that only I can judge it as worthy or not. The work is not paid work, but it is work nevertheless. It causes great discomfort for many people close to me to watch me do this without any tangible results. I know that to write what I truly want to write, I must write daily, and for long periods of time, but right now I don't have the top soil for that, and so I'm amending the soil every day with exercises like this blog, like planting little annual flowers of poetry to keep my connection to my intuitive writer's mind, and I pray that my grand idea (and actually I do have one) will finally find a place to be planted that can support its growth. I am learning everyday to trust my process and see that I am supported to do this work, and I am grateful.

Divorce

Hope had become
A thin and brittle branch
Upon which she perched her life.
Without talons, gripping
That view of the world,
She looked unsteady, unsure, and felt it.
Still she insisted on clutching,
Half out of the fear of having to return
The weight of her life to
A trunk she could no longer perceive,
And half out of the pride
That she’d managed so far.

Inevitably, the branch would break
Because wisdom was not in that roost.
Time does not run backwards, and this is
The thing about tree-climbing:
Inching back feels more dangerous
Than falling.
So hope became a fantasy.
Clinging to the unwise choice, she
Dared not
Move.

Refusing to recognize the conditions
She found herself in, kept that false
Security something like a nest,
But left her immobile,
And quickly becoming petrified,
Like ancient rock buried in living tissue.
The slightest disagreement in the balance
Of her needs and desires
Splintered hope further and no duct tape
Encouraged new growth on that branch.

Until she could desire
No more than she needed
And even that was too much
Until there was nothing to do but breathe
Into the SNAP that would,
Finally, plunge her to the ground.



The fall seemed long.
The wind rushed against her.
She wished for wings, for the branch
That had once held her so erratically.
Other branches grabbed at her
Tempting her with promises, but
She kept on falling until the falling
Seemed like all there was to life.
Giddiness took over, laughter spilled
Out of the thrill and she wondered
At how high she’d gone on
Pure fancy,
And if she’d ever have a vision again.

Rock bottom seemed more
Vague than she’d expected.
In fact, she was never sure if
She’d actually hit it, but rather
Had been caught by the twisted roots
Of her vast tree,
Like a net for a trapeze artist,
A welcome surprise.
Oddly, she lay prone, looking up at the
Peculiar path of her fall and wondered at
The Light that now shone through the
Thick of leaves and sticks.

Her hands,
Feeling the gnarled firmness beneath her, stung,
No longer numb to her situation.
Her lungs lurched towards oxygen.
Her face,
Wet with sap and tears,
Did not smile for once, and
For the first time in a long while,
Allowed instead the truth
Of her concern to reveal itself,
As she reached for the bits and pieces
She thought were important.
And, she found her illusory collection
Had been reduced to
Only what she loved,
Her children,
Her body
And her mind.