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| March 2006 Everywhere there are jubilant signs of spring. Great lavender-blue clouds of ceanothus are blooming and wild, exuberant cucumber vines festoon every available tree and shrub along the trails. Random carpets of deep purple nightshade cover large patches of the ground trailside. In the mountains, occasional bushes of wild peony are popping up. All through town, edible and decorative fruit trees are bedecked in pale and deep pink flowers. Mock orange and true orange blossoms are fragrantly unfurling. In my little meadow, the wild grasses are almost two feet tall and the first California poppies have opened their brilliant orange flowers to the sun. All the crew cut plants in my container garden have begun to send up new leaves. There are buds on several of the rose bushes. The rosemary is full of purple blooms. On warmer evenings both cricket song and frog music surround me once again. And, one of the resident mocking birds who's perfected an imitation of my little alarm clock wakes me several times each morning it's dry enough for me to have slept out in my tent, Drenching rains these past three weeks have left more snow on the high mountain ridges that I see from my door. They've kept me sleeping indoors a lot more than usual. And, with the rains, the annual greening of the lower mountainsides is deepening. Despite the new life burgeoning all around me, I've spent much of my time this month feeling tangled in webs of old sadness, grief and despondency. I've felt inordinately crabby, out of sorts a good part of many of my days. I'm so tired of having the pinching problem in my lower mid-back. I keep trying different treatment options; keep releasing more old, stuck-in-my-body emotional energy. Nothing as yet moves it toward resolution. Each morning I wake and find it still there. I feel hopeless, helpless and exhausted by it. It continues unabated despite treatments with a new chiropractor that's been willing to actually adjust the lower thoracic vertebrae that are troubling me. (My former chiropractor-mentor to this younger woman-was more conservative about risking adjustments in the area so close to my existing compression fracture.) This new practitioner's also been doing some interesting energy work that feels quite powerful even while it has little effect on the problem. The bone pain began just a month after I started taking Fosamax weekly. At the time I remembered having read that a possible side effect of the drug was skeletal-muscular pain. Yet, since I'd also stressed my back with too-heavy leg weights in the same time period, I decided to stay with the Fosamax for a while. (Part of me suspected I might just be looking for any reason to stop the drug I'd been so reluctant to start.) After five months, I've decided to go off the medication to see if perhaps this unremitting problem might really be a side effect of taking it. I'm guessing it'll take at least a month for its effects to be fully out of my system. Maybe it will all turn out to be as simple as that. What's seems so odd to me is how troubled I am by the problem, even though it interferes not at all with my regular activities. Though the pinching pain is quite tolerable in those few moments in a day when I happen to bend backward at just that point along my mid-back (turning over in bed, hooking my bra, turning over as I do my leg lifts), I keep feeling overwhelmed, plagued by its persistence. The hopelessness, the despondent sense that there is no help for my situation is such an old familiar feeling. I spent my whole adolescence filled with that same despair. Then, I spent much of the seven years of my second live-in relationship sunk in that very same pit. Of course, this time around it's being stirred by a physical rather than an emotional challenge. Still, the despair when it fills me is exactly the same. I know that all there is for it is to feel it, to let it come. Then, when it all seems like too much to bear, I watch movies for hours and hours; I've watched 25 movies during the past three weeks. DVD's and movie theater movies take me out of my funk into other realities for a break. Working does that, too-takes me out of my upset self into the parts of me that continue to be fine and solidly present to now. It's strange to be engulfed by feelings that I haven't been visited by in such a long while. Even though they're stirred by the physical challenge, I still believe this siege is connected with moving forward in the process of birthing the book. And, there's certainly been some real and exciting movement in that process this month, even in the middle of the ongoing miseries. Debra (my agent) sent a good bit of useful and clarifying editorial feedback to help shape the introduction to better fit the working title. The notes she sent along with the edits were filled with excitement, encouragement, renewed commitment to the manuscript and lots of general pom-pom waving. My friend Annie generously volunteered to do some editing for me while I was waiting to hear from Debra. Annie's lovingly hilarious, pointed and enormously helpful annotations had me laughing uproariously as I slashed away with my red pen. (“You may not use the word journey one more time in this intro,” “ Too many adverbs…you can trust the simple verbs.” “You use tender too many times, you may only use it two times in this entire intro,” “You can't use the word nurture, nourishing any more in this intro…sorry.”) It's funny to remember how fiercely I'd argue with my friend/collaborator Barbara over the editorial comments she sometimes offered as she previewed the columns before we uploaded them to the site. In those earlier days, I needed to write and web-publish everything in just the way that it came to me. Yet, when I started on the book project, I felt sure that I was finally ready to take editorial feedback. I trusted that I would be able to cut and change things without feeling any wrenching attachment to my words. It's been wonderful to discover that I was right about my readiness. So far, I've been available to incorporate input from Debra, Annie, and my friends Carol, Myrna and Sarah, all without feeling the slightest injury or irritation. It's been amazing to discover how much fun I'm having trimming, and streamlining and seeing through other's eyes. There's been so much excitement in this new and different creative process. I'm feeling catalyzed and energized by input that I wouldn't and couldn't have begun to tolerate before now. Timing is everything. This past week I've sent the latest revision of the introduction off to Debra. Since she's in the middle of moving house from an apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs, I suspect it'll be another two or three weeks to hear back from her. So, I'm back in a waiting cycle again. The front house continues to remains empty of new tenants, so there's waiting there, too. While I wait, I've a shelf of library books to read and some books on tape both in the house and in the car. March is the time I start each year's first monthly cycle of fertilizing my container garden. There are several storage cupboards brought from my old house last year that could use a fresh coat of paint. There's a mask-She Who Shelters the Sorrows of Women-started five years ago, who may or may not be ready for her next layer of emerging. There are fires to build, dreams to dream, a kitty to cuddle, naps to take, the beckoning of mountain trails on dry days and a week ahead of unplugged time for silence and solitude. It might (or might not) as well be a time for diving deeper into dialogue with the pinching pain in my back. Though I never know where the energy of the moment will lead me, I'm ever committed to follow its lead, unceasingly amazed at the braiding of joy and sorrow, excitement and despair. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
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