How did you know he was the one?

Last week, the Girl!Twin called home from college. I miss having her around, and it was a good talk. I’d posted on Facebook about the day her dad proposed to me, and how I hadn’t taken him completely seriously at first because it was April Fool’s Day.

This is the Girl!Twin, headbutting a goat. As you do.

She asked, “How did you know he was the one?”

[I should add a caveat here: I don’t believe in The One. I do think some people are more suited than others, but a mature, basically decent human being can build a life with any number of potential spouses. We all have so many choices in life, so many varied experiences. And the idea that you have to somehow stumble upon the one right person, at the right moment? That seems like way too much of a crap shoot for my tastes.]

One of these fabulous beasts is the Spousal Unit.

Looking back, I can’t say there was one defining moment when I looked at the Spousal Unit and thought, Yep, that’s the one. More like a series of moments, when I saw the pattern of our lives intertwining, when I recognized in him someone I’d enjoy being with for the long haul.

But there was one conversation early on, which caught me off guard in the best way possible. It was late 1990, early 1991, just before the first Gulf War started. The future Spousal Unit were driving around—probably headed out for shakes at that great little place off campus in Provo that doesn’t seem to exist anymore—and discussing current events. I don’t recall what we disagreed about. It wasn’t an argument; I just expressed my opinion, and then commented that he probably wouldn’t want to date me again.

I do remember, vividly, what he said next: “I think it’s sexy that you’re smart. I’m tired of dating girls who couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to hear that from my significant other. I’d dated a few guys before that, some of them nicer than others, but not one of them—not a single one—ever made me feel that the quality of my mind was important. I’d long since decided not to play stupid for anyone, because that’s a horrible way to live, but I’d gotten used to boys politely ignoring that part of me. Having any measurable degree of intelligence was at best the sort of defect that someone could overlook if I had enough acceptable traits. I’d never imagined that holding my own in a discussion of geopolitics might be a selling point.

That’s the story I told my daughter. And I said, “The right person for you is the one who loves your whole self.” Too often in life, we accept less-than because that’s how we see ourselves. Even the good parts of us can make some people feel uncomfortable. But that’s not the kind of person you want to wake up next to for the rest of your life. The right one fuels your good ambitions, because they already see the culmination of them in you.

It’s good to be loved for being a whole person.

We were both fairly intelligent people until we had children, and we've been wrong and stupid pretty much every day since then. True story.

[Side note: If you ever meet the Spousal Unit, and happen to ask him who’s the brains of the family, he’ll probably say it’s me. Apparently he’s known for bragging me up behind my back. But you should not believe him, because he’s an absolute whiz at a number of things that stump me, and he’s one of those people who’s always willing to learn something new. Which, to my mind, is one of the best measures of intelligence.]

The obligatory 'Where do you get your weird ideas?' post

I had a variation of the ‘where do you get your ideas’ question on Twitter last week. Since I’m not famous, it’s not one I have to answer very often, but it’s definitely not the kind of thing I can fit into 140 characters, either. So this is my (admittedly limited) knowledge about ideas.

First of all, if you court ideas, you will end up with more of them than you can ever hope to use in a lifetime. A few years ago when the Spousal Unit and I were vehicle-hunting, a car salesman found out that I’m a writer, and he spent as much time trying to get me to ghost-write a book for him as he did trying to get me to shell out for a car. “It’s a great idea!” he said. “It’s a science fiction novel, and you write science fiction! I’ll split whatever we make on it!” He was very enthused about this plan. I was rather less so, inasmuch as he was offering half the profits to me while asking me to do all of the actual hard work. I told him what I always tell people in that situation: Write it yourself. If the idea makes you feel that way, then you can do better justice to it than I ever could. And anyway, since I usually have a good half-dozen novel ideas besides the one I’m currently writing and the three I need to revise, it could be a while before I get around to you.

This is a good reason why you should write your own damn book.

Connie Willis is known for saying that ideas are like the leeches in The African Queen. “You don’t get ideas,” she says. “Ideas get you.”

This is more true than non-writers realize. I find ideas are especially pestiferous when I’ve reached a slow spot in the current work-in-progress. I’ve made a wrong turn, or need to think more about the characters and their motivations . . . and suddenly there’s a shiny new idea jumping up and down and waving its metaphorical hands in the air. Like the know-it-all in fourth grade, it yells, “Hey! Pick me! Pick me!”

And I can never resist taking a little peek. Here’s the thing about ideas for me: they aren’t like a dry memo from some corner of my brain. I get movie clips and sound bites, but only long enough to intrigue me, and then they’re gone again. So I’ll overhear a couple characters having a heated argument about the heist they’re planning, or I’ll see someone about to step into a dangerous situation. For the story in the Ocean Stories anthology, a young woman who’d suffered a devastating loss was stuck at a social event and trying to stay out of sight when a mysterious stranger showed up—and shifted shape between when my character saw her and when everyone else noticed her. Everything else—the whole world—grew out of that moment.

Last week turned out to be a week for writing poetry. (Poems and stories have completely different energies. Usually if I’m writing one, it’s difficult or even impossible to write the other—but that’s a post for another day.) I wanted to experiment with formal poetry—sonnets, villanelles, and the like—so I got some of my poet friends to make requests and suggest words. So far I’ve written eight new poems, mostly generated from those suggestions.

I realize this is how many of you think of poetry, but I like you anyway.

Sometimes I read something and it strikes a creative nerve. The current project grew out of a true-life account of some very weird circumstances on a ranch in northern Utah that my friend David suggested I read. But it may not be as obvious as that. A whole poem may spring from a phrase in a history book that hits me in just the right way. (I realize I’m using a lot of violent verbs here, but for me there’s an intense, often physical reaction when an idea shows up. The best ones make the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end. I’ve learned not to ignore it. It’ll knock—really loudly—but if I don’t answer, that idea will leave again without warning.)

Ideas aren't going to listen to your requests anyway. Get used to it.

This is why I’ve learned to tolerate the distraction of shiny new ideas. While it’s important for writers to finish what they start—ask anyone who’s been reading the Game of Thrones books how we feel about unfinished projects—creativity is an organic process. Nurturing the energy that churns up new ideas can be as vital as enduring the slog where it seems like the story will never come together. And sometimes, the lizard hind-brain knows things my conscious mind hasn’t yet processed. The image that seems like it has nothing to do with the current story somehow fits into the pattern, making the whole stronger than it would have been otherwise.

And I know I’ve been using weasel words in this: ‘somehow’ and ‘sometimes.’ Maybe you want a road map to writing a story, and I’m giving you a couple of sketches and a nice soundtrack instead. But that’s the part where the magic comes in. You can cultivate that moment by showing up, by feeding your brain with interesting pictures and words and experiences. The magic happens in its own time, though.

When I was a kid, I’d visit my grandmother, who lived in a 250-year-old cottage on the coast in Maine. There was no electricity and no running water, so we had to use the hand pump in the yard that brought up rust-colored water that tasted like iron. If you’ve ever done that, you know that when a pump goes unused for a while, it can lose suction or whatever it is pumps need to do their job. You have to prime the pump, pour a little water down into the mechanism, and that’s enough to get fluid moving in the right direction again. Creativity is like that—it needs a little inspiration sometimes, but once that energy starts flowing, it’s hard to put a stop to it.

I totally miss the good old days of going to the outhouse in the middle of the night and hanging my naked ass over a hole filled with angry spiders. No, wait, I don't miss that.

So prime that pump with the most interesting words and pictures and people you can find. Try something new. Be brave, and be hopeful.

And when those ideas are mobbing your doorstep, don’t forget to take a moment and let them introduce themselves, even if you’re already busy. Write them down, so they don’t wander off.

Getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable

One of the things I’m working on this year is learning to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. I think a lot of my bad habits grow out of the desire to paper over any feelings I don’t like: sadness, anger, shame, fear. It’s one thing to say, “Oh, eating unhealthy foods is a coping mechanism.” It’s another thing entirely to understand what it means in connection with my moods and behavior.

If I could just live in my most favorite place . . . all my issues would have an ocean view!

A key moment came when I was rereading The Inner Voice of Love by Henri J. M. Nouwen. Nouwen, who was a Catholic priest, struggled with a deep depression—the kind of dark night of the soul that tends to lead either to powerful insights or really destructive behaviors. Or maybe both, if you're like me. The Inner Voice of Love  consists of a series of brief essays that he originally wrote to himself as he worked through this chasm of despair. Later, friends advised him to seek a publisher, and I am glad he took their advice. His perspective as a Christian may not work for every reader, but the things he has to say about being kind to himself, befriending those broken and fearful parts that he’d been shunning, are some of the most moving words I’ve read on the subject. I think they’d be helpful to a wide range of people.

The thing that struck me on this reading addressed the empty place Nouwen recognized at the heart of himself. As he worked to find a better mental and spiritual state, he gained the insight that this hollow place—what he seemed to think of as the inevitable distance between any mortal and God—was something he’d been trying to fill for years with relationships and other means of avoiding the pain. The relationships, he noted, always fell apart because he needed something beyond what any fallible human, however loving, could provide. Nor could he avoid for long that gaping hole, however alluring the distractions he found or created.

If you're able to laugh at this, probably I've never decided you were the answer to all my problems.

What finally dawned in him was the need to make peace with that absence, accept that it was an integral part of himself and his experience. In his essays, he counsels himself to be present with the pain, the confusion, the disappointment. To not grasp at other people, to not avert his gaze.

As it turns out, this is both excellent advice, and really, really hard to work on. I am a clever monkey, and lots of things interest me, so it’s far too easy to let my own stories or other people’s stories or craft projects or shiny objects or whatever paper over the pain for a bit. Or chocolate. Chocolate is a good paper-overer. At the same time, I’ve found myself repeatedly trying to befriend people who are clearly not that interested. Apparently the Bad Brain thinks if I can just win over one of those too-cool people, it will somehow make me okay. All those years of social floundering and loneliness and feeling like I don’t belong will . . . I don’t know. Not have happened? Belong to some other social leper?

If you’re somewhat less crazy than I am, you can probably see that none of those things will work, long-term. It can put the brakes on the downward mood spiral for a while, but it doesn’t end. There aren’t enough spontaneous bookstore purchases in the world to shut off the Bad Brain permanently.

Sometimes your shadow self just wants to snuggle.

But here’s the thing I’m learning: if I just sit with the uncomfortable stuff, whatever it is, it turns out I am not actually going to die from it. And while it still sucks, sometimes monumentally so, it’s also temporary. The pain fades into the background. I can be with that void, that chasm, acknowledge it, and after a while I can get back to being present with the writing, or the family stuff, or friends . . .Real life. The chasm is real, too. It’s the shadow part of me, working through the past, and the present. It’s doing necessary things. The fact that I didn’t want to see that for a long time doesn’t negate the meaning of it.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a terrific essay on the shadow self in her book The Language of the Night. It’s been too long since I’ve had a chance to read it, but one of her points has stayed with me, and surfaced again as I was thinking about all this. Basically, she said we all have that shadow self. And the only way to live with it is to acknowledge it. If we try to run, or pretend it doesn’t exist, it just becomes more and more powerful. It’s in accepting our shadow selves that we become whole.

And, yeah. This has not been a great week in some ways. I’ve been restless and out of sorts, having a hard time focusing on the super-important tasks I meant to be doing. In some ways, emotional and spiritual wounds are like physical ones. Just as scars will itch, sometimes years after the scab falls off, that restlessness is a sign of healing. It makes a difference, too, when I can take a deep breath and sit next to that hole in my heart, that wound which never seems to heal. There will be sun later. For now, I’ll sit with the shadow and find out what it needs me to know.

Finding Ritual

One of the more comforting aspects of organized religion, at least for me, is the sense of ritual that comes ready-made for the worshipper. Several friends who worship in different traditions have been talking about their late-winter rituals. One of them made candles for Imbolc. Another anticipates Ash Wednesday with a funny bit about the different kinds of crosses people might find on their foreheads. (True story: The Spousal Unit comes from a solidly Utah-Mormon background, and grew up in the secular wilds of California. So when we moved to the Buffalo area, which has a large Catholic population, he was a bit mystified by some of the traditions. One winter day he came home from work and said, "A bunch of people left work and came back with smudges on their foreheads. I didn't know if I was supposed to notice or not." I gently explained Ash Wednesday to him.)

Anyway, all this has me thinking about the importance of ritual, both for uniting a community and for giving the individual markers for growth and change. Given the things I've experienced, there are parts of my old life that no longer move my heart--it's like finding that the pair of comfortable shoes that took you many wonderful places has worn out, the sides splitting or the tread scraped away. You don't want to lose the good parts--sometimes you can replace the sole (See what I did there? HA!) or glue the loose bits. And sometimes, you have the chance to pick something new that fits right, that doesn't rub blisters on your heel or push your toes out of place and give you bunions. Still, the need for ritual continues. I think for many of us it's a deeply human need, whether in small acts or the overarching patterns of life.

Certainly for writers like myself, and many artists of different stripes, ritual can be a key element in developing the work. Whether it's having a favorite kind of pen or tool, or acts that get the creative brain going, it can be hard to work without them. (It's said Victor Hugo wrote naked. Another writer dressed in a business suit every day before going to his home office. I like to start with journal writing, which seems as though it has a lot less potential for embarrassment if anyone drops in.)

Spiritual rituals go deeper, a kind of sanctification or devotion. We use rituals to step out of the noisy space of daily life, to put ourselves in a mindset that enables us to think beyond the immediate. It's a necessity for anyone who needs that quiet, and I don't think it's limited solely to religious acts. But there is a religiosity about it, in the best sense.

So how do you go about renewing the ritual aspects of life, when you've stepped away from the tradition in which you've spent most of your life? That's the question I've been asking myself lately. It's one of those things that, as time eases the ache of what I've lost, kindles a new excitement. The possibilities are endless. All I have to do is find where my heart fits, the words and acts and patterns and rhythms that heal me.

LetterMo

It's National--or maybe International--Letter-Writing Month, or LetterMo for short. The idea is to write one actual, honest-to-God, on paper, stick-a-stamp-on-it-and-toss-it-in-a-mailbox letter. If I recall correctly, it was Mary Robinette Kowal who came up with the idea originally. The writing of letters is an art that should not be lost, and a tangible gift to others in an age of soundbites and ephemeral snippets of wisdom and humor compressed to 140 characters or fewer. (Not that Twitter doesn't have its benefits, but like many writers, I like having the space to spread out and develop a thought. Obviously.)

Admittedly, nothing I write to you would be this awesome. But I'll give it my best shot.

For the past couple years, I watched LetterMo come and go without participating. It was guilt-inducing, because I like writing letters almost as much as I like receiving them, but I also have commitment issues (probably the spouse and children are to blame for that) and a letter every day? For a whole month? I'm likely to run out of friends before February 29th!

Even so, I've decided to give it a shot. Letters went out on day 1 and day 2, and I've gathered up all the missives that need a response so I can catch up. And after that? I guess it's time to make some new long-distance slow-post friends.

Let me know if you'd like to open your mailbox and find something more personal than bills, credit card offers, and catalogs.

Thirty years after: Challenger

Miss Johnson was trying to get our Algebra II class to simmer down and focus on, you know, math stuff. One of the guys wasn't in his seat when she called the roll, but he appeared in the doorway of the classroom a short time later.

"You'd better have a good excuse," she told him.

"The shuttle just exploded!"

She thought he was kidding at first. We all did; Matt was a notorious jester, who would do anything to break the tedium of schoolwork. It was only the second or third time he said it, with a look of utter horror on his face, that we realized he was serious.

Maybe Miss Johnson knew it was important for us to witness the moment, as terrible as it was. Or maybe she just sensed  that she wouldn't get any work out of us that day. We trooped down to the library, buzzing with morbid curiosity, and stood in a crowd around the TV. Over and over, the news showed that familiar arc of smoke and flame as the shuttle blasted off, and then the moment when the familiar turned strange, the miracle of flight turning to disaster and death. The walk back to Algebra II was a lot quieter.

We were too young, at least those of us who were students, to remember earlier tragedies that marked humanity's ascent beyond earth. The magic had become commonplace, and we'd forgotten the climb has a cost, one that too often has to be paid in blood.

And there's no neat ending to this. So long as we are human, we'll seek to push our boundaries. It may be from curiosity, or necessity, but it will happen. Sometimes, we will triumph.

And sometimes, those who are left behind will watch, and mourn, and strive to make the next leap a little better.

Poem: Blessing

A few days ago, I shared this poem with some friends of mine, people who have been a positive influence in my life as I've worked to make changes and be a better person. Several of them told me I should share the poem with everyone, in the hope that it would be a bright spot for others. With that intent, I'm posting it here. Feel free to pass this on to someone who needs to hear it. All I ask is that you leave my name and copyright information with it.

Blessing

My affection rests like a benediction

on the heads of my friends, kind regard

like a cool palm on a fevered brow.

When life bends you, endless weight

pressing your shoulders, I lean close and gather

it up. You will not stumble, you will not falter,

you will rise up instead, rise as the sun

burnishes the horizon, rise as the tide

sweeps the shore clean at dawn, rise

like the craft of hands or the fortitude of hearts.

I bless you, my friends, with life full of hope

and passion, the fierce bright song kindled

and undying. I bless you to be seen, heard,

beloved. I gift you with the music of infinite spheres

spiraling through the cosmos, endless light

stitched across the darkness, the notes of every song

you were born to sing. I shelter you

in the strength of sisters, the brotherhood

of verse, the family of understanding,

of being known at the core.

I see you, my love touches you,

a finger’s brush to remind you—you are still

all you have ever been, and more. And more.

c. 2015 Jennifer Crow