I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I adore Patti Digh’s book Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally.  I love her writing, her depth, her sizzle. This is a book that makes me sing with life and the possibilities we all have for transformation and awareness. It is the best antidote I’ve got these days for the pain and fear raging around us- that and loving hugs, long naps, frevent prayer and letting myself feel whatever I’m feeling.

Here are two tasty soul bits and a longer excerpt from the book.

Presence

“How do we hold presence for each other? How do we hold love for others with no agenda? Who was able to hold presence for us as children, without asking us to perform to their standards? Who really saw us and heard us and didn’t ask for anything in return?”

Patti goes on to tell one of my favorite Marion Woodman stories. Love that story Patti, I tell it to retreat participants all the time. Reading this section reminded me of what I can do differently with my daughter — we’ve been two pieces of sandpaper rubbing each other the wrong way- how, yet again, I’ve gotten into a loop of her not feeling seen and heard — because I’m always asking her to do something else. Sheesh, mom, be here now and accept me for who I am. Thanks Patti for the reminder!

Polish Your Mud Ball

“Pick an art form and create one item every day for thirty-seven days, whether it be writing a poem or haiku, making a collage, practicing your calligraphy, drawing a 2-inch by 2-inch picture, crocheting a square, painting a small canvas, or arranging flowers. Stick with the same art form for thirty-seven days — get one done every day without exception. Focus on quantity instead of quality. What emerged from the repetition and habit?”

I’ve always wanted to do this. Keri Smith told me once she had to do something like mke 90 million peices of art in like 2 seconds when she was in art school and that’s how she discovered her illustration style.  It reminds me of the creative research that shows that people who create really great stuff are those that maximize quantity: the more you make, the more chances you have of getting something you like.

Burn those jeans

In this essay, Patti discovers that “certain pair of pants” are not what they seem and how tempting it is to hold on to a goal that seems like the right one but, in fact, is just an excuse to beat ourselves up.

Patti’s jeans are Levi’s that over the years,

“become a symbol, a talisman, an icon of my perfect high school shape, that lean and strong teenage body that ran and hiked and climbed and bicycled everywhere, that simpler shape before broken hearts, sexual harassments, dead parents, business suits, big promotions, missed deadlines, inane meetings, working with mean people, being mean myself, dead friends, terrorist attacks, hydraulic systems failing on planes I happened to be on, and just plain living the overrated adult life.

These jeans are cosmopolitan, accompanying me to college, abroad to live in Germany, to graduate school, to all my jobs, around the world on a ship, to twenty years in Washington, DC, and recently back to North Carolina where, ironically, they reside in a closet only 54 miles from where I first wore them. Full circle around the globe, that denim, those rivets, that distinctive red tag.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to carry them around with me, no. But there they were, everywhere I went, a reminder in denim that I don’t have that body anymore and that I had a Big Goal: Get back into those jeans.

Years passed.

I still couldn’t fit into them. I beat myself up for failing to reach that goal. I joined fitness clubs, worked out with a trainer named Thor in DC who nearly killed me, drank Master Cleanser Lemonade, joined Weight Watchers, and studied before and after pictures in Shape magazine as if I were consulting the hieroglyphic special edition of Man’s Search for Meaning. But even with all those starts and stops and high expectations, and the few successes, the jeans still hung in my closet, unworn and taunting me…

When Emma was in the sixth grade, she complained one morning that she had no pants to wear to school. I resisted  Parental Lecturette Number Seventeen on Household Laundry Procedures, when I heard her plea for help, I was standing at my closet door and saw in front of me The Jeans. Why not, I thought. It might be a while before I can get into these again.

“Try these,” I said. “They’re kind of retro and too big for you, but you can wear a belt to gather up the extra. And remember, I want them back so I can wear them!”

“Awesome!” she said…
“Emma took the jeans to her room, then brought them back. “Thanks, but they’re too small,” she said, throwing them in my general direction.

Too small?

For thirty years I’ve tried to get back into a pair of blue jeans that are too small for my thin, strong, athletic twelve-year-old daughter.

Everything is a metaphor, isn’t it? Replace the word jeans with that albatross hanging around your neck, following you around through your life, diverting your attention from the real goal, setting you up for certain failure. Is it the wrong goal? Is it an unworthy goal, unreachable and unreasonable, one that can only make you feel bad, not good and right and strong?

Why do we punish ourselves with such unreasonable expectations, putting life on hold until we reach them? What is the real danger of such pressures? They delay living, the real life right in front of us. “I’ll do that when,” we say to ourselves. “I can’t do that now because I haven’t yet done this,” we explain. It’s like having an incomplete in your graduate Milton class that just keeps hanging over you, making it impossible for you to do anything else because your comprehensive exegesis of the two parallel falls of Paradise Lost looms ahead of you at every turn. Not that I have personal experience of this phenomenon.

Are the jeans even the real goal?

Enough!

Do those jeans represent a carefree, simpler more active life, a less stressful way of living, a life less encumbered? Perhaps those are the goals I should reach for, not the jeans themselves.

37 Days: Do it Now Challenge

One evening this week, pour yourself a nice glass of a 2002 Pinot Noir from New Zealand’s Mt. Difficulty vineyard or a nice bubbly apple cider, brush off a chair in your nicely manicured backyard, put some sweet Eva Cassidy tunes on the CD player, grab the safety matches from the kitchen and a delicate bottle of lighter fluid, and go outside and burn those old jeans. Torch that goal that limits and minimizes rather than frees you.

Make your goals challenging, not destructive. Look behind the goal to see The Real Goal: is it the jeans or something else you’re longing for?

Have I torched those jeans yet?  Not quite yet.

Thanks Patti!  You are a wise, funny, inspiring light in my world.