For when you trudge through the mud…
And ask yourself, why?
Every time I try to sit down and write this, new shit comes up I need to deal with.
Taking my dog to the ER vet to get stitches. Grabbing both our dogs from the neighbor after they escaped to explore the world without telling me. Caring for a sick kid. Losing it on my other kid, me crying, then apologizing to him, and then the harder part, to myself. Mothering in general feels extra hard this week. It doesn’t help that my house feels like we live in a perpetual mess.
I’ve been thinking about the messes we get ourselves into. The muck we trudge. The hells we dizzy ourselves in, small or big.
When I am in the thick of it, sometimes I scratch my head and ask myself:
Why is this happening?
I just got back from meeting fellow tree huggers1 in a forest in Slovenia, a beautiful country in central Europe. In a plateau deep in the forest between spruce trees I could see patches of vibrant yellow-orange flowers and, like a fly to a flame, I headed straight toward them.
My path was spongy, squishy earth, called peat bogs, which are wetlands filled with partially decayed vegetation. To get to these sprouted delights sprinkled over the forest floor, my boots had to get wet and dirty. I’d often lose my balance and it took way longer to get there than I anticipated. The only way to get to the marigolds was to cross that mucky muddy ground.
And this is what I’ve been pondering, this metaphor of instructions for life.
These marsh marigolds I sought grow in muddy swampy areas, so do the lotus, the hardy hibiscus, and the willow tree, among other beautiful beings much like us humans.
A Zen Buddhist monk, known for being steadfast in teaching peace, while being deeply involved in the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh, said we are flowers and compost: “The flower, when it wilts, becomes the compost. The compost can help grow a flower again. Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again.”
After visiting the mud-soaked flowers, I’ve been noticing how everything around me is evidence of polarities that are cycles of life and death, yin and yang, masculine and feminine, light and dark, flowers and compost, over and over again.
My yard is a microcosm of this theory. We have chickens that eat our leftovers, their poop is used to flourish our vegetable garden, and the tasty eggs that show up on my breakfast plate. Even though our own biases get in the way to think differently, none in this equation is bad or good, it’s just what is.
The entity is dirty and decaying and delicious and beautiful.
Tom Hanks as a WWII era women’s baseball coach said it well: “The hard is what makes it great.”
I was in mental mud for a decade. I was barely holding on, it hardly felt like living. If I clocked in the guilt for how I showed up for myself and my family during this time I’d be rich in overtime pay. But now that I’m far enough removed from the mud days, I’ve been carefully cleaning the shame and guilt, and evaluating why it all happened.
I have two ideas, a couple what ifs to my why.
1: What if this experience was a story, a concept, a learning that was waiting to be told?
Music producer Rick Rubin popularized a theory that ideas exist around us. Our jobs as creative people is to quiet our minds, stay open and receive inspiration when it comes to us. Artists are antennas for ideas and if we do not choose to bring that information to life, it will find someone else.
Maybe my radar caught today’s essay idea and I decided it was time for me to share it with you.
2: Or what if the muddy years was simply there so I can grow? We are compost and flowers.
I wrote a letter from love this week. My friend texted me asking if I’d be open to doing an exercise with her, called Letters from Love. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert2started this practice, asking others if they’d join her in these simple yet profound directions on writing letters from unconditional love:
Write “dear love, what would you have me know?” Then don’t over think it. Just write.
Here is an excerpt from my letter (read the caption because my 6am handwriting sucks!):
Finished my certificate as a guide to forest bathing with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy
Like Rick Rubin, Elizabeth Gilbert reports the same belief that we catch ideas as artists and we are the vehicles to make those ideas come to life. She openly talks about how she never completed writing a novel and the story needed to be told so it chose another author.