Why in the world do you write? And why are you writing a memoir in particular? I’ll tell you why I wrote mine (which, incidentally, still hasn’t gotten published). My son Dan was diagnosed with diabetes at nine months old. Doctors had never dealt with such a young diabetic baby, and they were clueless. Then at twenty two, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He died at age thirty-eight. During the sixteen years we took care of him, the book I wanted and needed had not yet been written.

I also wrote my memoir to get a hold of how, by indulging my son, by changing the rules to make life “easier” for him, by reinforcing the message that he was handicapped in every way, I was actually crippling him more than the disease was. Writing about my experiences with this sick kid gave me exactly what I needed to see what I was doing. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a long trip from brutal awareness to actual change.

In 1977, when Dan was six, I read Be Here Now, Ram Dass’ landmark hippie book, and my life jumped the traditional tracks. I started driving around listening to his tapes, buying all his books, reading and underlining like a person possessed. I was a person possessed. I started going to silent retreats and meditating. I felt my heart opening and my mind wrestling with old paradigms, questioning everything and rejecting nothing.

In retrospect, it was almost as if I had been in training for the tsunami that was coming. Just in time, I had found my teacher. 

Ram said things like, “It’s all just phenomena happening and it’s all unfolding perfectly,” and, “There is no good. There is no bad. There just is. It’s the judging and the labeling that creates the suffering.”

As difficult as my boy’s journey was for all of us, for the first time I had a spiritual understanding. This is not to say that the situation wasn’t incredibly painful. But the pain at least had meaning. I realized that nothing about my life was random. It was about growing my soul. Who knew there was such a thing as growing your soul? Life had nothing to do with destiny. It had everything to do with how I chose to react to the constantly changing circumstances. It had everything to do with learning to let go of my need to control and learning how to be with what is. And that practice, being with what is, made all the difference in the world. 

I knew my husband and I had done this thing differently from many people, and I wanted to write it, at first just to get it on the page. And then to try to understand, with a little distance, what it was we had actually done.

People kept telling us we were courageous and that we were heroes. That sounded nice, but it had nothing to do with what we were doing. The fact is, we weren’t doing anything. We were being. We were just putting one foot in front of the other.

Later, once I saw what I had written, I realized that here was the book I had wanted. I had wanted to know that suffering doesn’t kill you. I had wanted to know that there would be  moments of such profound beauty I almost wouldn’t have traded them for ease. I had wanted to know that this was bigger than mother and son and sickness, and I had wanted to know that I had every right to have a broken heart- and that you don’t die of a broken heart. I had wanted to know that when I was stuck in the role of mother of a sick child, it gave Dan no other option than to be in his role of the sick child. But mostly I had wanted to know that this was my soul’s graduate degree, and I was going to get straight A’s.

 Writing it down was cathartic. Writing it down invited me to stand in a different place, and writing it down helped me begin to heal. 

Writing it down showed me that fighting any of it, pushing any of it away, would have taken all the energy I needed to stay fully present. Writing it down made me realize that I could take what happens to me and turn it into something else, something beautiful, something full of grace. But in writing it, I knew that before it turned into grace I had to feel the grief. I couldn’t skip the pain part.

Here are a few questions for you: Why are you writing your memoir?

Are you writing it to get it out of your body and onto the page? If no one ever sees it, will you still be fine? Are you writing to heal?

And/or

Are you writing to help others- and because it will be so much fun to pick out your outfit for your book signing? Because your father will finally realize how great you are, and David Weinstein will finally realize what a mistake he made by dumping you? Because now you are a bestselling author and your interview with Terry Gross has been aired three times already? 

And/or

Is it a way to tell your kids and your grandkids who you were? And because it’s just powerful to write?

The question I asked myself was, How was it possible that we were able to laugh and cry within seconds of each other? Writing my memoir answered all my questions, including this one.

 

Excerpted from Nancy’s new book, The Healing Power of Writing Your Messy, Imperfect, Unruly (but Gorgeously Yours) Life Story (New World Library 2022)

Transcript

Krista Tippett, host:If you have listened to On Being for any period of time, you have probably heard me invoke Rainer Maria Rilke. His works of prose and poetry are enduringly beloved — the Sonnets to Orpheus; the Duino Elegies; the Book of Hours. But none of his words have carried more persistently across time than his Letters to a Young Poet. It’s a small volume of ten letters Rilke wrote between 1903 and 1908 to a young military cadet and would-be poet, named Franz Kappus. Kappus reached out to Rilke, full of anguish about life, about love, about adulthood. But Rilke’s way of addressing these questions from an ordinary life touched on the enduring dramas of creating our lives — prophetic musings about solitude and relationship, humanity and the natural world, even gender and human wholeness.

And now, for us, there is a new translation. What a joy it is to delve into Rilke’s voice freshly rendered, with the translators, themselves prophetic humans: the wise psychologist and poet Anita Barrows and the incomparable Buddhist philosopher of ecology, Joanna Macy.

Joanna Macy:In his letter that he wrote — he wrote an amazing letter, Rilke did, from Sweden. And he starts out saying, “I’ve been thinking.” He’s not responding so much to the cadet, but he’s speaking about: there’s something going to happen. It is enormous. It is huge. “We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us: the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

The conversation that follows is infused with friendship as much as ideas. Joanna and Anita have translated Rilke together across decades, alongside many other professional and life adventures. I’ve come into friendship with both of them as guests on this show — Anita on “The Soul in Depression,” Joanna on her spiritual and activist “Wild Love for the World” — and all three of us have communed with Rainer Maria Rilke across time and space. The Bohemian Austro-Hungarian world into which he was born in 1875 was utterly remade by the tumult of the young 20th century. Amidst the tumult of our young century, I spoke to Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy via Zoom.

Well, I wish I were sitting in a room with the two of you. [laughs] But here we are.

Joanna Macy:Can I see you?

Tippett:No, you can’t see me. You’re just going to hear me. I’m like the voice of God coming straight into your thoughts …

[laughter]

… and you into mine.

Anita Barrows:I’m not even going to look at my screen. I’m going to look at the redwood tree in front of my house.

Macy:That’s a good idea.

Tippett:This is a little hard to get used to, but I mean, I sometimes close my eyes, so I can completely listen. And it’s such a joy to be with the two of you. And I can’t really tell you how excited I was when I heard that you were translating Letters to a Young Poet, which — I feel like this book has — it’s been part of my life for such a long time, since — I think, Joanna, one thing you and I have in common is those — the early years we spent in Berlin, or in Germany. And we were both there in chapters of its 20th-century tumult, which was kind of a fault line of the world’s 20th-century tumult.

And I have my book with me. I think the two of you have your books with you. And I really just want us to kind of talk about this book and read to each other. And you know, I was just amazed, recently — I’m not sure I knew this or had ever taken it in — to read — well, it’s in your book, too, but I had read it recently somewhere else, that Rilke himself was only 27 when he replied to these letters. [laughs]

Barrows:That’s right. And I did not take that in at all, when I read it. I assumed he was an elderly man. [laughs]

Tippett:Yes, yes.

Macy:Well, he never got to be elderly.

Barrows:Right. Right.

Tippett:No. No.

There seems to me something that I have identified with in the last period that wasn’t there for me when Rilke entered my life, which was in the last couple of decades of the last century, is that he was a turn-of-century person, just as we have become turn-of-century people. It feels like there’s something in the heft of what he said and how he said it that he, also, in 1903 when he was writing those letters, was on the cusp of this unimaginable tumult and carnage and transformation of that last century.

Macy:Yes. You know, in the Book of Hours, which we’re not talking about, but he then, just a couple of years younger than when he is writing to the military cadet in his letters to this young poet, he said, “The leaf is turning like a century is entering,” just at that moment, at the becoming of the 20th century. And you could feel his — what would you say? — his awe and a troubled sense: what is in store? And the fates that are turning this page to the 20th century look at each other and say nothing. And he senses — he could’ve known nothing about the two world wars, the death camps, the nuclear bombs, the — [laughs] none of that. And yet, he sensed that to his core.

Barrows:Yes, very much, and he was very aware of the dangers of industrialization, which were already beginning to have their effect, certainly on Europe. And I think that was a piece of it — that there was an ominous sense of what was happening to the natural world which he loved.

Tippett:And all of that, everything that you two have just mentioned, is with us still and again, right?

Barrows:Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Tippett:That’s what I kind of — I feel, emanating from these pages, from these words.

It does seem to me — I have to say, in the last week, just in the last week, I have had his language of living — his language of living the questions has become absolutely central to my work and to my life. And just in the last week, for example, I’ve had it quoted at me by a neuroscientist and by a television actor. [laughs] And it does feel to me like if there is — and so let’s just maybe start with living the questions. Let me just read that passage, very particularly that experience of standing before great personal and civilizational questions, which right now have no answers. [laughs]

So he said — and which letter was this? This was Letter 4.

Barrows:It’s the fourth, yeah.

Tippett:“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.”

Macy:What a wonderful way to relate to uncertainty.

Barrows:Yes, yes. And I think, you know, so much, especially in our very consumer-oriented society, where we’re looking for answers all the time, we’re looking for solutions — rapid solutions and neat solutions — [laughs] here we are, being told to live into the questions, to be able then to say, “I don’t know. I have to sit with this. I have to be with it.” It’s a practice that we’re not taught by anything in our society.

Macy:But it’s the only way to be in the present moment, because when we want to know, “Oh, where’s this heading? Are we heading to war? Are we heading to — can I have it now? Shall I be — can’t I have hope?” All of those things, even the question of hope takes you out of the present moment. And the present moment is the only place you’re really present, the only place where you can actually choose.

Tippett:You know, I have actually really taken this teaching as a life practice of holding the questions, loving the questions, and of — I’ve taken it as a life practice, with a question — to actually very actively do that: put the question before me, hold it, treasure it, nurture it, walk with it. And I have found that if you are faithful to a question like this, it will be faithful back, right? It will do this thing that he says, which is that you live your way into whatever the form an answer takes.

Macy:Yes! Then it comes toward you. Then it has more to say to you. Then you can hear it. And it — then you have a capacity. You are with the question in a way that invites you to become something that you haven’t been, yet. It extends a hand. So this is what I have been feeling even more in this last year or so, with all the work with Rilke’s feeling in him — this sense of opening to the reciprocity of life. It’s a living world. We can listen to it. We can open to it. It’s not a machine that we poke and press and push a button. It’s a mystery. And we meet the mystery, and then it talks.

[music: “Orchard Lime” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being — today, delving into Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They’ve just released a fresh new translation of that work.

[music: “Orchard Lime” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Joanna, I say, so living the questions is perhaps the part of the book that I feel — I’ve watched people culturally discover, so many people discover or have it be part of their life. I have also always felt, and never more than recently, that the things that Rilke said about gender 100 years ago, in this book — that our world has met him there now.

Macy:Or almost.

[laughter]

I think that we still have a lot to learn. I think he’s a little bit beyond us, at the moment.

Tippett:Well, let me just — like there’s one part, also in that fourth letter, where he says, “Perhaps the genders are more closely related than people think. The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this: that male and female, freed from all false feelings and disinclinations, do not seek each other as objects, but rather as siblings and neighbors, to become human together, simply, seriously, and patiently helping each other bear the burden that sexuality has placed on them.”

[laughter]

Barrows:Isn’t that wonderful?

Tippett:Well, it — to me, it’s a description of — of where we are — as you say, fitfully, imperfectly, but I think heading as a culture. But then, of course, there’s the extraordinary part in the letter from Rome, Letter 7, where he talks about “the girl and the woman.” I don’t know — does one of you want to read some of that?

Barrows:Yes, sure.

Tippett:Page 59 — 59, 60 is where I’m looking.

Barrows:Oh yes, oh, that’s wonderful. Yes.

Tippett:Or maybe “One day the girl and the woman who don’t define themselves …” Whatever you’d like to read, as much as you’d like to read, there.

Barrows:Let’s see. I’m looking for exactly — oh, here we go. “One day, the girl and the woman who don’t define themselves in masculine terms but as something in themselves, female humans, will require no other completion. This enormous shift will transform the character of love, which is hampered today by the resistance of men, and generate a relationship from human to human, not from man to woman. And this more human love, endlessly considerate and light and good and clear, consummated by holding close and letting go, will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare — the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.”

Macy:Ah.

Barrows:Yeah, I love that passage. [laughs]

Macy:Yeah. Yeah.

Barrows:Yeah — “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” Yes, so it’s not the merging, not the convention-bound ways of acting.

And I love that Rilke speaks — I mean, I could see where it could be critiqued, but I love that he speaks, at the beginning of that paragraph, about the ways in which women need to be careful of not just stepping into the patriarchal system, the patriarchal values, which, you know, has happened to a large degree. We’ve had the feminist movement, but in many ways we have not yet brought the feminine sufficiently into our culture. And the feminine — I think Rilke — you know, [laughs] Rilke was talking about this so early on, at the beginning of the last century.

Macy:He was also concerned that in the freeing of coming to experience and being free to experience one’s sexuality, it was male sexuality. So much of what — how sexual freedom in our country, and even sexual fulfillment, has come to be identified with what he calls here the “lust and thrust and restlessness.”

[laughter]

Tippett:I don’t think that was in the Herter Norton translation.

Barrows:No. [laughs] Right. Right. We had a good time translating that.

Tippett:[laughs] And what we’re talking about is the feminine aspect to humanity, right?
Barrows:Yes, exactly.

Tippett:This is not just about women. It’s about a fullness of human nature and human capacities.

Barrows:Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Tippett:I’m just curious, and Joanna, you’ve lived such a long time, you’re so amazing — I wonder how you see, again — well, so we should clarify that Franz Kappus was writing to Rilke, as this lovesick young person, right? So he was bringing sexuality into these letters. But Rilke did always reply to that in — well, he replied in a very tender, personal way, but also in the whole context of relationships — of gender, really, that certainly 100 years ago was so much of a box and a container and compartment. Joanna, I’m especially curious about how you’ve watched this evolution.

Macy:Well, I’m remembering — yeah. I’m thinking of the love between Rilke and Lou — Lou Andreas-Salomé, when he was 21 and she was 35, and they met. And it was just a totally powerful experience that outgrew the sexual part, at  least from her point of view, but they stayed best friends. And she took him walking barefoot through the fields at dawn, [laughs] in the foothills of the alpine meadows along the Isar, near where we used to live, and that he adapted so quickly to this natural singing of the Earth itself, in his bones. And he combined it also with the simplicity of the — sort of the Russian peasant that he acquired when he went with her to Russia. And singing the Earth became — he could feel that.

What a shift from in his late teens and 20, 21, becoming such a dandy, and to let himself open to the natural world so widely, so fully, and let that shift what love of man and woman or love for anything felt like — was. The freedom in that, and then even what that could mean for politics. And that gave him a trust in life that I sense in him, in his words, in his poetry. Life comes toward him to meet and be met. It rings in his lines. And it reaches me, and standing here, a hundred-and-what …

Barrows:Almost 120, yeah.

Macy:… when we cannot be sure or even have the trust that complex life forms will endure beyond the next few decades. We’re seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And yet, having been with Rilke, his trust in life is still with me. And so I trust being with life, even though life — the web of life might crumble, but then I’m still with it. I’ll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling. The song is so deep in him.

[music: “Ballet” by Thrupence]

Tippett:After a short break, more with Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

[music: “Ballet” by Thrupence]

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, as a new rendering of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is released in a world in which his voice and vision feel as resonant as ever before, we are delving into that work with the translators. Joanna Macy is a philosopher of ecology and Buddhist teacher. Anita Barrows is a psychologist and poet. They are the closest of friends, and former guests on this show. They’ve previously created splendid translations of three other books of Rilke’s writing. Rilke sent his ten prophetic letters about life and love to a young, lovesick military cadet and would-be poet, between 1903 and 1908.

So let’s talk about solitude for Rilke, which was also so defining, so permeated his poetry, his life, his writing. It’s so interesting to be speaking about solitude right now, in the post-2020 world, where, civilizationally, we went through — almost the global “we,” although with huge variation in terms of the experience — but of social isolation, right? And I wonder, I’m curious about this world that we move into beyond that — at least the parts of the world that are emerging from the worst of the pandemic. Do people start to reckon or work with or play with solitude in a new way? And what would Rilke have to say to that?

Macy:Well, I’m so struck by how members even in my own family, my own children, my own grandchildren, how the pandemic and the lockdowns and the care of has resulted, for so many of them, of more time out-of-doors in the natural world, in direct contact, even if it’s when it’s their backyard or walking in the park, and giving them a habit of this that they do not want to give up, and that the solitude becomes — as it was for Rilke — not being by yourself, but by being in, with, surrounded by, and of the living natural world; that you’re surrounded by the rustle and touch and reach and murmur of the natural world.

Barrows:Yeah. And I think that was really something Joanna and I discussed throughout the process of doing this translation, because there are moments in the letters where Rilke seems to idealize solitude at the cost of community, at the cost of some belonging to the collective. And we were at moments irritated by that, because —

Tippett:Yes — he also seems to emphasize it at the cost of probably being a good partner [laughs] to the woman he’s with.

Barrows:Exactly. Oh my God, yes. [laughs] Right. Right. Right.

Tippett:Sorry, go on.

Barrows:Yeah, no, we kind of got fed up with it, at moments. [laughs]

[laughter]

Macy:Yeah, we worried about if the young cadet were to take him seriously. You know, you have to be — if you’re forbidden to write poetry, if you’re forbidden to write, then you’re not a — you must be ready to die for your …

Barrows:[laughs] Right. Right.

Tippett:You know, here — I’m going to read a little bit from — this is page 56. This is from Letter 7. You know, I have to say, this is a passage that was so important to me in my 20s, and really life-giving. I mean, this is to me a robust definition of solitude that is about —about making and defending that home within oneself.

So he says, “Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price, to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.”

And then he says, “To love is good, too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.” So he’s always — even as he is defending solitude so fiercely and, as you say, sometimes extremely, it always moves back and forth with the notion of loving.

Barrows:Yes, yes, exactly. And he really emphasizes the need to love from that place of solitude — that love is not about merging, but it’s about being oneself fully, and from that place of fullness …

Macy:Yes, I love that.

Barrows:… being able to meet the other. Yes. Yes.

Macy:Right here he says, “For love is not about merging. It’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.” I love that.

Tippett:It’s so interesting, you know, I remember being so moved by that and it being so helpful to me in those young years, when I was tempted — I mean, you know, because he’s really saying to Franz Kappus, to his young correspondent, “Become yourself, before you join with another human being.”

And — but I say, also, that language, after my marriage ended, after my divorce, I read it again and realized how wise it was, right? I mean, it’s incredible wisdom.

Barrows:Yes, I know — I felt the same, after my divorce. And I thought, all right, the love I have for my children, the love I have for my friends, that love also needs to come from that place of wholeness.

Tippett:Joanna, I’m curious about that phrase for you and that notion for you.

Macy:Well, just when I was sitting here, I was remembering — because our first conversation was shortly after my husband died, after a marriage of 56 years. And I remember, about a year before we married, I’d been talking away, talking away as he was driving, and then he just looked at me and he said, “What a world you’ve got inside you.” And then I knew that it was my own world, and he could tell. He didn’t want to own it, he didn’t want it to be explained, but he was so glad it was there.

All of that was in his voice. And that stayed with me throughout all those five-and-a-half decades — a world in myself. And being a stranger to each other, to some extent, we always affirmed that. And Rilke helps us there.

Tippett:And in your memoir, Joanna, you wrote about your long marriage. And it was an adventure, right? And it had — it had hard parts in it, it had parts in which that — the fact of being strangers was defining. And yet you kept finding your way back to each other.

Macy:That’s right. That’s right. It was always interesting.

[laughter]

Always interesting. [laughs] Yeah, never finished. Never finished.

[music: “Donnlee” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today delving into Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. They’ve just released a fresh new translation of that work.

[music: “Donnalee” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Macy:Well, speaking of growing and seeing with expectations and not knowing, did you catch the part in these when he talks about “You haven’t lost God” — because, you know, the cadet, Franz Pappus, was a complainer. You could tell that.

[laughter]

And so he complained that he’d lost God. And so [laughs] because — and he’d believed in God as a child, and now he didn’t anymore. And then he even complained about that. And so — remember? And he has this great idea. He says, “Just think” — where do I have that …

Barrows:Page 51.

Macy:I just — it tickles me. [laughs]

Tippett:Would you like to read that?

Macy:Yeah, he says, “Do you think that anyone who really has Him” — God — “could lose Him, like a little stone? Don’t you think that one who holds Him” — God — “could only be lost by Him? Why not think, rather, that He is the one who is coming, moving toward us from all Eternity, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What stops you from projecting God’s birth into times to come and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the story of an immense pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is ever again a new beginning? And couldn’t it be His beginning? For to begin, in itself, is already so beautiful. If God is the fulfillment, must not what is lesser come before him so that he can emerge from fullness and overflow? Must he not come last, in order to include everything in Himself? And what meaning could we find, if God for whom we yearn belongs to the past?”

Tippett:And then that next sentence — “As bees gather honey, so do we reap the sweetness from everything and build God.”

Barrows:Yes. [laughs] Yes, it’s wonderful.

Tippett:So Joanna, talk to me about — tell me what’s in that, for you.

Macy:Oh, so much. So much. I’m — it’s inside me. I’m 92 now. I am in this tenth decade of my life, when I follow with rapt attention what is happening with the climate catastrophe, with the mass extinctions of our siblings in the creation of this world. I feel that there is within me a sense that, read through Rilke, the translations, and also very much through the work that I have been blessed enough to do, called The Work That Reconnects, and that starts the spiral journey that it is, with gratitude — so much gratitude — that what’s in it is that we are never abandoned. But there is something for us to behold and be part of and that — and to be there. The great moment is there for us, to be present to this incredible moment. We’ve got to realize — we will realize that we belong to each other. That’s coming forward now. How could we not harvest that understanding in this moment? 

Tippett:And you know, Joanna, if somebody had, let’s say, just tuned in in the last ten minutes and listened to you speak about God, they would not guess that you are an eminent Buddhist teacher. What does that language of God — what does that mean for you? How do we talk about what that is and how that itself has been evolving?

Macy:Because God has become a word for everything, so we reach for something that includes everything. I’m looking in his letter that he wrote — he wrote an amazing letter, Rilke did, from Sweden. And he starts out saying, “I’ve been thinking.” He’s not responding so much to the cadet, but he’s speaking about: if you could take in, there’s something going to happen. It is enormous. It is huge. “We must accept our reality in all its immensity.”

So you need God language for that if you’re in the West, and then, of course, I was born into a theistic, a Christian tradition, so it’s in — and I come from [laughs] a long line of preachers, so it’s in my bones. “We must accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only courage required of us: the courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.”

Tippett:You know, I’m curious about — you’ve talked about this as a time in which we are faced with the “great unraveling” or the “great turning,” or perhaps both of those at the same time. Just with this conversation holding us, with Rilke by our side, what do you see right now?

Macy:Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so we who are alive now and who are called to — who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world — to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how — if it must disappear, if there’s dying — how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what — and so there’s a need, some of us feel — I know I do — to what looks like it must disappear, to say, “Thanks, you were beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.”

And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be — has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness, you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face, see how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.

Tippett:You know, when I think about Rilke and the ways he brings together solitude and love, I feel like you also have always have brought together what I would think of as synonyms or companions to those, like interior life and aliveness. I’ve heard you talk about the voice within and that if people can hear the voice within, they hear that the voice within wants to live. And when people can share that voice within, they fall in love with the world, they fall in love with each other, they fall in love all over again with life.

Anita, you have spoken about your calling as a psychologist and a teacher, and also as a translator and writer, as standing at the intersection of the sacred, the daily, and a holding of the pain of the world. So I just want to ask you the question I asked Joanna a minute ago — what do you see, looking out right now, and again, with Rilke as our friend standing alongside us at that intersection?

Barrows:I think about the passage that I referred to before, from the Ninth Duino Elegy, where Rilke really speaks about what he sees as our mission as human beings. “Perhaps we are here to say …” — and then he names things about the world. So for me — I actually just had a book of poems published, called Testimony, which is 20 long poems and a coda. And each of the poems speaks about some of the suffering of the world — I speak about a prisoner, I speak about a child in Syria, I speak about a checkpoint in the West Bank, occupied Palestine — speaks about the suffering of the world, and then I move in other sections of the poems to the beauty of the world. And for me, that intersection of suffering and beauty, gratitude, as Joanna says, feels like my mission in poetry.

And to state that, to name that, to be here to name those things feels essential to me, and I see Rilke as my friend in that. This conversation is so wonderful, because it’s really bringing me back to the origins of my reading Rilke, who really was the first serious poet whose work I read when I was first feeling my own vocation as a poet — that he was so engaged with this as our mission, perhaps we are here to say. And if you have the passage, Joanna?

Macy:Yes, I have it, and I remember when we translated that together. This is the ending of the Ninth Duino Elegy. An elegy is an incantation or a poem at the end of a funeral.

“Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I seek no other law
than yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

“See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.”

Tippett:Ohhh.

Macy:Thank you, Rilke.

Barrows:Yes, thank you, Rilke. Thank you for accompanying us.

Macy:Thank you for being with us.

[music: “Klockan” by Andreas Söderström & Rickard Jäverling]

Tippett:Joanna Macy is the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects. Our previous episode with her is “A Wild Love for the World.” That’s also the title of a lovely book of homage to her, published in 2020. Anita Barrows was part of the On Being episode on “The Soul in Depression.” And both of those shows include readings from Rilke’s poetry that they’ve translated together so brilliantly: Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; also, In Praise of Mortality and A Year with Rilke. Anita Barrows’ most recent poetry collection is Testimony. She is Institute Professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and also maintains a private practice. And Anita and Joanna’s Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary was published in June, 2021.

[music: “Vittoro” by Blue Dot Sessions]

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Laurén Drommerhausen, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Jhaleh Akhavan, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Ben Katt, Gautam Srikishan, and Lillie Benowitz.

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being is an independent, nonprofit production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

Our funding partners include:

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org.

Kalliopeia Foundation, dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality, supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org.

The Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.

The Charles Koch Institute’s Courageous Collaborations initiative, discovering and elevating tools to cure intolerance and bridge differences.

The Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community development, and education.

And the Ford Foundation, working to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement worldwide.

 

This interview originally appeared:

https://onbeing.org/

 

Every life is a work of fiction. That’s what I tell my memoir students. People come to me wanting to tell their life story, the narrative that sums them up, the myth that captures their essence. They expect to find this story hiding inside them like one of Michelangelo’s statues trapped inside the marble, fully formed and waiting to appear.

They’re in for a big surprise, of course. Instead of finding the perfect story, they discover a tower of Babel, a slew of motley characters in search of a coherent author. There is no singular there there, they find, no masterpiece fixed inside of the stone. There are episodes, anecdotes, motifs, impression, memories, and foregone conclusions melded with imagination. But a fait accompli narrative strong enough to support the sum of their many parts? This is just a fantasy.

We construct our personal myth from the random facts that life presents us, connecting dots to make a shape, devising plots from circumstance, changing characters, fashioning conflicts, adjusting structure, settings, and themes, as our lives unfold over time. Although our stories are fiction, we operate as if they were true. We are Homo narrans, the storytelling ape, the only species that survives by creating a conceptualized self—the character “I”—apart from the flesh-and-blood creature it is. This is how we brave existence on a mysterious planet. To cope with mystery, we create story. Having no idea who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, or what life means, we adapt by giving names to things and pretending the names and stories are real.

This is the root of our ignorance, mistaking ourselves for the story. When we see that this is a false equation, that we are not synonymous with our story, it is a watershed moment in self-realization. Students are often taken aback when this happens. “Who Am I?” they ask themselves, unable to locate their story on paper. This question is their initiation into the life of self-inquiry. In time, they come to see that the gap between story and self, which feels at first like a disaster, is actually an open door, a portal to personal freedom. It’s the crack in everything sung about in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “That’s how the light gets in.” Inhabiting this crack, standing outside our story, affords us a measure of liberation.

From this witness perspective, we see that we are many selves living many stories. Although we’d prefer to think of ourselves as having a consistent personality across time and space, this is simply not the case. No one’s the same at work as they are at home, in flagrante delicto or shopping at Macy’s, sitting in church or drinking on Bourbon Street covered with Mardi Gras doubloons. As Dostoevsky pointed out, man is the animal that can adapt to anything. Shifting situations, we adjust our masks and stories, morph, dissemble, compartmentalize, omit, and change like chameleons,gluing our many selves together with this fictive “I.” Self-inquiry in writing or wisdom practice unsticks the glue and frees us of the adhesive pronoun. This unsticking awakens us to the truth. When you tell the truth, your story changes. When your story changes, your life is transformed.

Knowing how little we actually know, we suddenly become a lot more creative. Buddhists call this “beginner’s mind.” Meeting each moment with open awareness rather than through a narrative scrim, we find ourselves snapping to attention. “If your mind is empty,” said Suzuki Roshi, the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “It is always open for everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. But in the expert’s there are few.” Creativity comes from not knowing, acknowledging that we are protean, quantum, shape-shifting creatures with many compartments and numerous layers, a chorus of multiple selves. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked in ”Song of Myself”. “Very well, then I contradict myself/ I am large, I contain multitudes.” Meeting our multitudes is an adventure. The most predictable person turns out to be a matrix of incertitude, a hodgepodge of possibilities pretending to have only one face. We contain this complexity the best we can but the changeableness of our fluid nature is a mystery we must tolerate. Mystery is always changing its story. That’s what makes it a mystery.

Truth focuses our internal witness, connecting us to that part of ourselves that stands outside the flow of time and needs no story to exist. Writing is hardly the only way of stepping outside our story. Catastrophe is also terrific. I discovered this in my twenties when I was diagnosed with a fatal illness. For more than a decade, I sat in this in-between place waiting for my body to wither and die. This period of prolonged affliction stripped me completely of my story. The life I’d known had cracked down the middle, the house I’d lived in, the self I’d believed in, the future I thought was waiting for me, was suddenly condemned. Simone Weil, the mystic philosopher whose life was a study in affliction, compared this state of prolonged dread to that of a condemned man forced to stare for hours at the guillotine that’s going to cut off his head. The upside of this situation is that as the self-story is worn away, the witness grows stronger in proportion. Catastrophe shows us the part of ourselves that cannot be destroyed, the consciousness bigger than circumstances. We’re no longer defeated by samsara. We have the witness to stand beside us.

In spiritual circles, it’s commonly thought that story itself is an affliction, that our goal as truth-seekers ought to be story-less-ness, Zen-like just this-ness, detachment from personal myths, as if we had no shape at all, no history, memories, dreams or dramas. But is this really possible? Should we strive to transcend narrative, reject the storytelling imagination, and not enjoy being Homo narrans? Of course not. Story goes hand in hand with survival. Story matters in the same way that having a body matters; both help us navigate the physical world. Story is our vehicle. Story enables us to pass wisdom forward as well as to connect. “All sorrows can be borne if we put them into a story,” Karen Blixen wrote. Telling stories is a sacred act of communion; we know ourselves, being known by others; we see and hear ourselves through the eyes and ears of people who will listen to us. Connecting through story, we feel whole, knowing we are not alone.

There’s a beautiful story about a Jewish woman who’d gone to a therapist because she was having trouble breathing. As they spoke, the therapist noticed the camp numbers tattooed on the patient’s forearm. The woman coughed a great deal while telling her story. “When did you start having trouble breathing?” the therapist asked. “When my friend died two years ago,” the survivor admitted. “When she was alive,” this lady told the doctor, “we could talk about anything. Although she had not been in the camps, she understood. But now there is no one to tell. And the nightmares haunt me. I can’t sleep alone in the house. I know that if I want to live, I have to find another friend.”

This is how important our stories are. But just as the mind is said to be a terrible master but an excellent servant, story is not meant to be in charge. If we remember who is telling the tale, the story won’t be living us. The witness is our reality check, watching the passing show like a wise man on the banks of a river enjoying the flood of experience. The wise man does not drown. He knows that he is not the river. He’s the witness to the river, telling stories about its passing, the swells of love and waves of heartbreak, the depths of nature’s complexity. Students new to telling their story come to me frantic and drowning sometimes, overwhelmed by how impossible it is to capture life in words. I suggest that they try getting out of the river. I teach them to watch the river, instead, and describe, down to the finest detail, everything they see. If they pay attention to the river, especially themselves, in all their human complexity, they’ll have stories enough to last them several lifetimes. All they have to do is write.

 

This article originally appeared:

Contemplative Journal

The first time I put up a one person show, I didn’t know what I was doing. 

The first time I taught a workshop, I didn’t know what I was doing. 

The first time I gave a sermon at the Church of the Pacific, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I learn by doing and hopefully, each time I get better.

I remember the evening I previewed LOVELAND, my one person show at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. The lead character, Frannie Potts, was incredibly challenging to perform.

Within 5 minutes of stepping on stage, I realized how limited my acting abilities were for Frannie. I couldn’t embody the emotional range required by the words I had written. I didn’t know what I was doing. Frannie sounded harsh and off putting, one note only. I could feel the audience recoil.

The next 75 minutes were excruciating. Minutes would go by of pin drop silence, a comedian’s worst nightmare. I couldn’t wait to get off stage.

Immediately following the performance, a former student came up to me and said,

Ann, it was so cool to see you fail. (This student was not known for her tact.)

She was right, I failed miserably and failing sucks, especially in front of a live audience. The next day, I had a two hour rehearsal with my director, Joshua Townshend. The next night I failed again but not as bad as the first night. Improvement!

My friend and fellow solo performer, Heather Woodbury, has this great quote regarding her creative work.

“Over time, my suck level got less and less.” 

This is what happened to me with LOVELAND. My suck level got less and less and a year later, LOVELAND won “Best Solo Show” in SF and LA.  

As a storytelling teacher, I have shared this story with my students many times and I’m often requested to tell it again. I think people like hearing it because it gives them permission to suck, to make mistakes, and to grow from these so called “failures.” Ira Glass, host of This American Life, talks about this too in his short two minute video on being bad in the beginning.

Think about your own creative life. Where have you demanded perfection from yourself? Can you let yourself make mistakes? Can you acknowledge it’s all part of the creative process? We have a tendency to beat ourselves up when we “fail,” but what if instead, we gave ourselves immense credit for our willingness to put our work out into the world.

During Covid, I was unable to perform. I had to find a new way to express myself. I started making short videos and they were not very good in the beginning. I could feel the inner critic wanting to stop me at every turn, but I vowed to keep going. I knew from years of experience that the only way to beat the voice of the inner critic is to not give up and keep showing up for my art. 

If you are feeling the voice of the inner critic to be overwhelming, I suggest letting it speak. Pick up the pen and ask the critic, “Why are you showing up today and what do you have to say to me?” This writing exercise is incredibly illuminating and can help you understand the relationship you have with this critic. On any creative journey, you will encounter this critic so it’s important to acknowledge it, but don’t let it stop you from achieving your goals. You can do it. You were born to create.  

What helps me most when I make mistakes and “fail” is to know I’m not alone and to let myself receive support. We need each other to help us through these times.

Right now, I’m working on another one-person show and as much as I’d like the development process to be perfect, it’s not. Writing first drafts is messy and trying out new material is always hit or miss. I have come to accept this as part of the creative process.

 

When people write about traumatic events, a question that often comes up is, “What if I don’t remember what happened? What if I was dissociated at the time? How can I recreate an event effectively on the page if there’s a blank spot where the memory should be?” This is a vital question for memoirists because it’s common for people to cope with traumatic events by “going away,” disappearing, or dissociating. People often report watching the event that was occurring from a distance, as if they were up on the ceiling dispassionately watching the action unfolding beneath them. “It was like watching a movie happening to someone else.” They witness the event but can’t feel it. Or they report just feeling “blank” or “gone.” 

As a little girl, I dissociated regularly when I was being sexually abused by my grandfather. The moment he reached under my nightgown, I’d send my mind soaring out the window or disappear into the light on the wall. Dissociating became a habit I spent years in therapy trying to break. With practice and intention, I learned to tolerate staying present more of the time. Yet even now, when there’s major stress going on in my life, when I’m confronted about something, or even when something moderately unpleasant is happening, it’s still easy for me to automatically check out, leave my body, or “go away,” so that I don’t have to feel the sensations, be conscious of what’s happening, or experience the terror, fear, shame, or discomfort that go with it. 

Yet when we write about our lives, the same traumatic or challenging moments that we escape via dissociation often play a pivotal role in the story we want to tell. These intense moments frequently represent turning points for our character—life was one way before they happened and different afterwards. They’re significant moments that shaped us. And if they’re germane to the story we’re telling, they need to be included—not necessarily all of them, but a representative sampling that gives the reader a visceral sense of what we went through. 

In order to write a scene that readers will feel and remember, we can’t just report on what happened to us, we have to include vivid sensory detail so we can put readers right in the room with us. So, the question remains, how can we do this when we were psychically absent, when our minds were elsewhere, when there are whole swaths of time we just don’t remember?

Many techniques can help us bridge these gaps. I’m going to list eight of my favorites and then share several examples where dissociation is effectively rendered on the page. 

• Start by writing what you do know. Use writing practice or freewriting to write about everything you do remember about the time surrounding the period in which you dissociated. Write about everything you recall leading up to the blank spot and everything you recall that happened afterwards. Write around the dissociative episode. Get as close to the empty place as you can. As you write about the “before” and “after” times, you may find that you remember more, though those memories usually come in disjointed fragments, not in a continuous flow—more like individual pieces of a mostly empty jigsaw puzzle.
• Utilize the prompt, “I don’t remember.” Do a 30-minute free write using the repeating prompt “I don’t remember.” Things like: I don’t remember who else was in the room. I don’t remember if it was spring or summer. I don’t remember what she said to me as she unlocked the door. I don’t remember what I felt. And so on. Try throwing in a “I do remember…” every once in a while. Alternating these two prompts. “I remember” and “I don’t remember,” can lead to a powerful piece of writing. It is possible to evocatively write about what you don’t know in a way that pulls in readers, getting them invested in your struggle to fill in the blanks. 
• Draw a floor plan of the location where the event occurred. You don’t have to be an artist to do this. Draw out what you remember—how the apartment was laid out, the furniture in the bedroom, the alley leading up to the door, the inside of the car, what the train trestle looked like. Draw what you can—don’t worry about scale or accuracy. Once you’ve made your initial sketch, jot down on your floor plan any sounds you heard indoors or outside (the tick of a clock, the sound of CBS News in the background, a lawn mower outside the window), any words or phrases that were spoken, any smells you can recall—the acrid smell of sweat, the sweet yeasty smell of the bakery down the street. Don’t worry if you draw a blank. If the location was familiar to you (say, a room in your childhood home), try to recall what it looked like or sounded like or smelled like at another time. Knowing where you were, imagine what you might have heard or seen or smelled. Write it all on your floor plan. In trying this exercise, you may draw a blank or you may find that more details and sense impressions come back to you. Even one newly discovered sensory detail can be used to build a whole scene around. 
• Share the fact that you dissociated with the reader. Write about your experience of dissociation (you’ll see some excellent examples below). If the reader knows you “left,” they’ll recognize that something terrible must have happened.
• Study your own dissociative habits. If dissociation is still part of your life, even in subtle ways, notice what happens when you dissociate now. Do you stare out the window? Stroke the edge of a silky blanket? Count in your head? Imagine you’re a bird? Count the cracks on the ceiling? Or think about what you’re going to cook for breakfast when X is over? Is this a strategy you also used in the past that you can embed in your writing?
• Trust the reader to fill in the blanks. As an example, if you’re writing about rape, you don’t have to share all the details in order for the reader to “get it.” If you utilize the few details you do recall around the edges of the incident (the kind of sneakers the rapist wore, the strong smell of cut grass, the way he carefully folded his glasses and put them on the nightstand), and then focus on your dissociation, the reader will fill in the rest. 
• When writing about traumatic events, fewer details are more effective. If you include too many traumatic details, you may lose the reader—possibly traumatizing her (and yourself) in the process. 
• Try to identify one salient detail of your story that you do remember and use that to tell the story of the dissociative incident. See the example where I write about my grandfather’s gift of candy below. 

Before moving on to examples, I want to give a trigger warning. All of them have to do with sexual abuse, in one case by a teacher and in the second, by a grandfather. 

In this first excerpt from the novel, My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell, the protagonist, a fifteen-year-old girl, has been groomed and seduced by her boarding school teacher, Strane. In this edited version of the scene, she’s home visiting her parents, having a clandestine phone conversation with Strane in her childhood bedroom. I’ve put Russell’s description of the protagonist’s dissociation in bold. 

“What are you wearing?” he asks. 

My eyes dart to the door and I hold my breath, listening for any sounds from my parents’ bedroom. “Pajamas.” 

“Like the ones I bought you?” 

I say no, laugh at the thought of wearing something like those in front of my parents. 

“Tell me what they’re like,” he says. 

I look down at the pattern of dog faces, fire hydrants, and bones. “They’re stupid,” I say. “You wouldn’t like them.” 

“Take them off,” he says. 

“It’s too cold.” I keep my voice light, feign naïveté, but I know what he wants me to do. 

“Take them off.” 

He waits; I don’t move. When he asks, “Did you?” I lie and say yes. 

It goes on from there, him telling me what to do and me not doing any of it but letting him believe I am. I stay indifferent, a little annoyed, until he starts saying, “You’re a baby, a little girl.” Then something in me shifts. I don’t touch myself, but I close my eyes and let my stomach flutter while I think about what he’s doing and that he’s thinking about me while he does it. 

“Will you do something for me?” he asks. “I want you to say something. Just a few words. Will you say a few words for me?” 

I open my eyes. “Ok.” 

There’s some muffling, like he’s moving the phone from one ear to the other. “I want you to say ‘I love you, Daddy.’” 

For a second, I laugh. It’s just so ridiculous. Daddy. I don’t call my own father that, can’t ever remember calling him that, but as I laugh my mind flies out of me and I don’t find it funny anymore. I don’t find it anything. I’m empty, gone. 

“Go on,” he says. “I love you, Daddy.” 

I say nothing, eyes fixed on my bedroom door. 

“Just once.” His voice haggard and rough. 

I feel my lips move and static fills my head, white noise so loud I barely hear the sounds my mouth makes or the sounds of Strane—heavy breathing and groans. He asks me to say it again, and again my mouth forms the words, but it’s just my body, not my brain. 

I’m far away. I’m airborne, freewheeling, the way I was the day he touched me for the first time, back when I soared across campus like a comet with a maple-red tail. Now I fly out of the house, into the night, through the pines and across the frozen lake where the water moves and moans beneath the ice. He asks me to again say the words. I see myself in earmuffs and white skates, gliding across the surface, followed by a shadow underneath the foot-thick ice—Strane, swimming along the murky bottom, his screams muted to groans. 

His labored breathing stops and I land back in my bedroom. He’s finished; it’s over. 

Strane clears his throat. “Well, I better let you go,” he says. 

After he hangs up, I throw the phone and it breaks open, batteries rolling across the floor. I lie in bed for a long time, awake but unmoving, eyes fixed on the blue shadows, my mind full of nothing, glassy and still enough to skate on.

In a later scene, the protagonist and Strane are in bed together. As he goes down on her, she once again disappears: 

As Strane works at me, part of me leaves the bedroom and wanders into the kitchen, where the cup he drank from lies tipped over in the sink. The faucet drips; the refrigerator hums. The kitten pads in from the living room, wanting to be held. Standing by the window, the broken-off part of me takes the kitten in her arms, gazes down at the quiet street below. It’s started to storm, a streetlight’s orange glow illuminating the sheets of rain, and the broken-off part of me watches it fall, humming softly to herself to block out the sounds coming from the bedroom. Every so often, she holds her breath and listens to check if it’s still happening. When she hears the metal scrape of the bed frame, the slap of skin on skin, she holds the kitten closer, turns back to the rain.

You can see how effective it is to focus on where she goes when she dissociates rather than the details of the encounter. Russell gives us the impact of the abuse rather than the details—a far more impactful choice.

In this example from my memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars, I minimized the details of the incest with my grandfather because I dissociated while it was happening. I couldn’t play it back like a movie I could report on, even if I’d wanted to. But I knew that this pivotal moment needed to be included in my book. So, I faced a dilemma—how to do it? 

I chose to vividly portray the events leading up to the incest and afterwards, but I only gave a cursory indication of what my grandfather actually did to me. I focused instead on how I dissociated while it was occurring—and in the aftermath—by focusing on the most vivid detail I did remember—the candy my grandfather gave me. In this scene, the light that I reference was kept on because my grandparents were Orthodox Jews and on Shabbos, lights couldn’t be turned on or off—so they were left on the whole time.

After I climbed into bed, Poppa sat beside me. In the street below, teenagers laughed and joked in Spanish—the sounds outside always louder than the pale echo of voices from the kitchen. Pulleys screeched on squeaky wheels as mothers pulled laundry from clotheslines. Soon they’d be folding T-shirts and pants, fresh from the line. 

It was story time. 

In broken English, Poppa told me the story about a skunk and a railroad car. At the end, the skunk sprayed. That was the punch line. Each time he told the story, he folded the blanket back—one fold, two folds, three folds—and I sent my mind out onto the fire escape, soaring over the clotheslines. I stared at the burning light that stayed on because it was a holy time. If I stared hard enough and scrunched my eyes tight, I could forget I had a body. That way, when Poppa reached under my nightgown, I wasn’t really there. 

I came back as he fastened his belt and folded the blanket on top of me—three, two, one. Quiet as a stone, I watched him open the top dresser drawer to pull out our special blue roll of Life Savers. Peppermint. I opened my mouth wide, and with rough fingers, Poppa placed a single round candy on my tongue. 

Paul and I each got a box of Chiclets gum when we left BPNY, but the Life Saver was special, just for me. It was our secret. Poppa never had to say, Don’t tell. He didn’t have to. The sweet melting candy was my yes. And so, I never told anyone. I never told Mom. I never told Dad. Not that night and not all the other nights. I buried the memories so far inside that I could no longer reach them. 

Once the Life Saver was centered on my tongue, I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep so Poppa would go away. This part of the ritual was mine and mine alone. Lying perfectly still, I let the candy dissolve. That was my rule: Don’t crunch it or bite it or crush it, even accidentally. I kept my mouth relaxed on the inside and made my tongue go slack, so the little wafer could get thinner and thinner without cracking. Swallowing was not allowed. I had to make the Life Saver last until it melted completely, but no matter how hard I tried, it always broke. Sometimes it lasted all the way till the last moment, when it was so thin, it almost disappeared, but by then there was so much saliva in my mouth that I had to swallow, and the pressure of my tongue on the roof of my mouth—even for a second—split the slight sliver in two. 

My ritual with the Life Saver was a form of dissociation—putting my full attention into something that took me out of the room. The term “lifesaver”’ is also poignant in a scene like this when there was no one there to save me, and the inevitable breaking of the Life Saver mirrored my own brokenness. In this way, focusing on the detail I remembered most vividly gives the reader the full impact of what happened without including graphic (or forgotten) details of the abuse. 

And in this last example, in the scene where I finally reveal to my mother, as a young adult, that her father abused me, I play with the themes of dissociation throughout: “going away” when the conversation is going poorly and coming back when it’s going well. When my mother expresses empathy for me, I come rushing back into my body:

Mom crooned the ancient song of mothers comforting their children. “Oh my God,” or “Oh, honey.” Something like that, but I couldn’t hear because of the rushing in my ears. I shut my eyes. Floated out of my body. 

“Darling, I’m so sorry.” 

Did she just say she was sorry? My God, she believes me! I don’t have to face this alone. I snapped back into my body, and the room came back into focus: My desk. My computer. My bed. My books. My weight on the bed. I was right to tell her. It’s all going to be okay. I can depend on Mom. 

Writing about dissociative incidents presents a unique creative challenge. But if you include the reader in your struggle to remember, write about what you do know, and include salient details surrounding the incident, you can create powerful, viscerally engaging scenes that will engage and hook your reader, despite the fact that you weren’t fully there when they happened.

It was after ten o’clock at night, and I was returning to my cabin nestled amid the redwood trees at a retreat center in the hills above Santa Cruz. I had been teaching a class on writing called “The Root Voice,” and I was ready for sleep. But the air was warm, the stars brilliant, and, with everyone in bed, the night tranquil. I turned away from my cabin and walked deeper into the woods.

Above me, the wind in the treetops filled the sky with the ocean’s roar. Beneath my feet, the Earth spun black as the heavens, so that the trees seemed to grow out of the sky and the ground simultaneously. Blackness wrapped around me and the damp earth, with its mix of sharp pine and dank scent. I heard the snap of branches, the crackle of dry pine needles; imagined eyes lighting up the forest like starlight. An owl screeched, beak and talon tearing into the night. Everything soft in me trembled. 

I could have headed back to the safety of my cabin there and then, but like a child enthralled by a scary fairytale I was pulled toward the enchanted world of the dark forest. I was five years old again, listening to my father weave yarns of witches, dark woods, and decaying castles. I sought out the scary places back then in Grimm’s fairy tales, read late at night by flashlight, inviting ghosts, goblins, and giants to follow me into my dreams. And I sought the scary places again that night as the moonless forest enfolded me.

When I was a little girl I often played in Holland Park in London. Not the wild woods, exactly, but with enough leafy chestnut trees and sinister-seeming corners to infuse me with excitement. Darkness is dangerous. But it also holds wonder and magic. It brings us closer to the ultimate mystery of things. Immersed in darkness, our imaginative powers grow. We conjure the light with clay, claw, and pen. 

If you have ever dared to brave the depths of your creativity, you know the power of darkness––know the world is a mystical and mercurial place. In the forest you glimpse a flash of feathers in the boughs, a paw print in the dirt, and you are graced. But you are also stalked. Something out there is seeking you too. It will only reveal itself if the moment is right.

Entering the woods, you are as much the hunted as the hunter. Lines of poetry pursue you; ideas and images track you. Beneath the shadowy trunks of trees, visions unfurl. A fallen log becomes a bear; a snake’s camouflage disappears her back into the forest; a hummingbird is there … is gone. 

Did you see it? Was it real? 

The wisdom you seek here can be experienced but never possessed. Wild, ancient, primal, it moves through the shadows. The presence of such mystery and immensity is overwhelming. You may have to fight the urge to break the tension by running away. But if you remain, at least for a while, things will happen. In this uncertain world, creativity flourishes. 

We may seek straight paths and the straightforward approach, but it is a Universe both circular and shrouded that shapes us. Physicists tell us that dark matter and dark energy comprise 95 percent of the Universe. With all our technologies, all our instruments, we have observed less than 5 percent of the cosmos. What scientists have measured, we sense with our souls. Entering the forest, we know we are bound by darkness, born into mystery. 

The light of modern consciousness burns brightly, but the Earth was never meant to be bare of trees, nor our souls fully exposed to the light of reason. We are meant to include some element of uncharted terrain in our makeup. A clear-cut area becomes drier and less fertile with time, just as we, too, are diminished by a modern mind-set that wants to elevate rational thought and industry at the expense of vision and spirit.

Mystery is wild. All forests hold an element of danger. What you run into can be menacing, even deadly. A wild creature can kill you. You can set out and become dangerously lost. But if you take the mystery out of life, you squeeze out your capacity to marvel. Avoiding risk, you bypass magic. 

As I walked that night in the redwood forest on the hills above Santa Cruz, I knew mountain lions roamed close by. The staff at the retreat center had told me it was dangerous to walk alone after twilight. I peered into the gloaming forest, perceived shadows prowling in the underbrush, felt the hair on my neck rising. So when something moved in the trees, I was certain what it was. I screamed. 

What emerged that night in the forest wasn’t the fierce and predatory creature of my imagination, but rather a tiny white moth, luminous, coming toward me on wings both delicate and strong.

Imagination flitters through us like this—always surprising, always wondrous. And we search for it in the darkness. 

Excerpted from Reclaiming the Wild Soul: How Earth’s Landscapes Restore Us to Wholeness