Reverb10. December 2.
Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it? (from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and Focus Manifesto)

One word. Email.

I love email. Having a preschooler with little tolerance for me being on the phone, email is how I stay in touch with friends across the continent and around the world. Those connections, however brief, are meaningful to me.

I hate email. I am buried under mountains of unread messages. My inboxes are the equivalent of an episode of Hoarders. It’s awful. Energetically it’s a load I no longer wish to carry. The incessant green blink of my smart phone taunts me wherever I go. It pulls me away from the present, from what I’m doing, from what I care about. It has to change.

I sit down to check my email before I write and suddenly there is only time to squeeze in a quick post, editing – or sleep – be damned.

I need an email intervention.

I bought Charlie Gilkey’s Email Triage system but haven’t used it yet. I recently got an email from him saying, You bought something from me, have you used it? Use it. Really. He doesn’t know me at all yet somehow, he knows me well. My life is paved with good intentions.

It’s easy to add this to my list of failures. It’s a quick step to beating myself up. I refuse. I breathe. I wonder if I can hire someone to unsubscribe me from all those newsletters I thought were a good idea. I know I need to set aside time to ruthlessly hit delete. Just as I am clearing space in my home, I need to clear space here.

And then I need to write.

Once upon a time I was a very calm mama when my daughter was sick. Then a procedure-happy pediatrician planted a seed of fear in the back of my brain and my baby died. The one-two punch shook me off my instincts. I remind myself that I am not crazy for needing to rest my hand on my daughter’s soft belly, the gentle rise and fall of her breath reassuring me that she is here, alive, sweetly asleep.

Last night I went to bed and burst into tears, whispering into the darkness, “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Why do I feel like I’m being punished?

When I hit publish for the first time on October 25, 2009, I had no idea what I was doing. I only knew that I wanted to write again and a blog felt right. I wrote randomly, wandering aimlessly through the blogosphere until December, when my friend Emma introduced me to Gwen Bell and her #best09 challenge. While I didn’t manage to write daily that month, I had suddenly, amazingly, found community. I met some of the most inspiring, graceful, lovely women I have ever known, many of whom have been a life line to me these last months. And if I ever get my act together there will be a list of them here so I can share them with the world.

Today, all of a sudden, was December 1 and it occurred to me that Gwen might be working her magic again. With the move and travel I haven’t had a chance to read what anyone else is writing about, or I would have already known that #reverb10 was a go and all my faves are back on board. If you are a blogger I invite you to jump in. If not, then I hope you enjoy what the prompts make manifest here.

*****

Today’s prompt:

December 1 One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (via @gwenbell)

Since the moment I read this, words have been swirling in my brain. Words like grief, shock, broken, lessons, open, love, brutal, loss, gifts, acceptance. I’ve been spinning, trying to find one word that makes sense, that captures what this hardest of years has been. Desperately searching now that everyone else is asleep and I have a moment to myself, I looked back at what I wrote as 2009 moved into 2010 and was struck by this paragraph:

Allow.

Allow all of it. Allow giving. Allow receiving. Allow the muses to sing. Allow Spirit to flow through me. Allow the questions and the uncertainty. Allow the letting go. Allow forgiveness. Allow love. Allow passion. Allow life to be what it is.

Did I manage this? At times, yes, beautifully. I fought like hell at others. Some days I’m still fighting – the fear, the uncertainty, the wanting things to be different now. I’m working on it, on the allowing – on allowing life to be what it is.

Life.

That is my word. That is what I’ve been living these past 11 months. Full of joy, love, anger, grief, hope, tears, hard lessons, big gifts – all of it. It was, simply, life.

And as I rocket myself forward through time in my mind’s eye, looking back at the year that is to come, the word that I see, the word I wish for, is ease.

And you? What’s your wish? Can you narrow it down to one word?

I wonder how many of us walk through the world appearing to function normally, but if the right button is pushed, the right music is played, the right question is asked, the wound we wear beneath our clothes begins to ooze. A lost child, a failed marriage, a dead parent, an act of violence witnessed or experienced. I wonder how many of us have the courage to meet that ooze with love, honesty and compassion, to allow the tears in front of strangers, to make the messiness visible and admit we can’t tie it all up in a shiny package with a Martha Stewart bow. I wonder how many of us harden against the vulnerability of it. How many turn unshed tears into fortress walls, heartache into armor, grief into rage. We are wounded and so we wound. We tighten instead of loosen, harden rather than soften, put on our best game face while we crumble inside.

As I wonder, my heart fills with compassion for all of us. We humans, the walking wounded. We do the best we can for our level of awareness. I do my best. Sometimes I fall short. Sometimes I rise to the opportunity I have been given to soften into love, grow into myself, sit in my own oozing skin.

In a moment of clarity I see that my work in this world is to turn toward ease and joy, to say yes to life, to allow the waves of fear, indecision, and uncertainty to wash through me, then come up for air with greater understanding. Life happens – moving, traveling, unmet expectations. I lose that clarity, that vision. I get grumpy. I throw a nasty look at the young man who cuts in front of my family in line, wondering at his sense of entitlement. I sigh when my daughter asks to be picked up for the umpteenth time when I’m trying to get something done. I look in the mirror and forget to love my body – this body that has carried me, carried life and now carries grief. I forget that the wound is there for a moment until my judgment cracks the scab and I see blood. Ah yes – there I am. Human.
Raw. Feeling my way back to whole.