[From What I Thought I Knew, Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, Inc., 2008]

Faint light is leaking through the bedroom mini-blinds, but there’s no good reason to get out of bed. It’s late winter in Southern Indiana. The sodden ground is blotched with dirty patches of snow, and wilted lawns droop, defeated under ashen clouds that have hung overhead for weeks. The two Chinese maples outside the windows of my second-story apartment are for half the year emerald and leafy with life, but now they stand skeletal against the sky.

Late last year, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her words — “It’s malignant” — floated through the phone line directly to my heart. The world tilted and I slipped towards the edge. My mother, the only true constant in my life, who would always love me no matter what, would die. Maybe not from this, but from something. Now, months later, her treatment seems to have worked, but I’m still reeling from the gut-level realization that my mom is mortal: someday I will have to continue without her. Just over a year ago, my sister Jean’s husband, Tim, did die unexpectedly at a young age, and in the face of her grief, I feel useless and ham-handed in my attempts at comfort. I’ve been sick myself with small illnesses one after another that have left me dismal and off-balance for weeks on end. Divorced for two decades, I’ve also been dateless for months and months. The shock of the last man leaving nearly did me in, and stumbling around again in the cavernous loneliness, I can find no place of repose. Even my women friends are busy with their own lives and seem too busy to include me very often.

My work isn’t going so well, either. When I left my corporate writing job to freelance, I had visions of writing more than marketing brochures and company newsletters. Sure, they pay the bills and serve a purpose, and more magazine assignments are trickling in. But it all feels flat somehow, not nearly as satisfying as I’d envisioned. Lately, without the energy or motivation to seek out more challenging, satisfying jobs, I’m working way too hard for way too little money, writing on autopilot and churning out writing I don’t much care about except for the money it fetches. And even that has been faltering as promised jobs or hoped-for assignments fall through.

All the juice has seeped through the cracks in my life, leaving me brittle as a husk. I need to rest, please, just rest, and not have painful demands or terrible surprises visited upon me for a long time so my weary heart can regain its balance.

 Once again this morning, it’s as if too much gravity pushes down on me, making movement difficult. It would be easier to just remain here, immobile under the blankets. But I have things to do, so I lure myself out of bed with the promise of hot tea. It’s not much, but it offers a small promise of comfort and warmth. Heat chugs out of the radiators, but in the old building with its poor insulation, it’s chilly nevertheless. I wrap my heavy robe over my flannel nightgown, pull on slippers over the socks I’ve slept in, and head for the kitchen. The apartment is small, so it’s not far. The vertical blinds in the living room and kitchen are still closed, cocooning my possessions in the dim light. I hear my neighbor Grace moving around in the apartment below.

While a mug of water heats in the microwave and a bag of English Breakfast waits on the counter, I open the blinds in the big kitchen window. A bit of sun breaking through the overcast hits the maples outside like a spotlight, and the sight startles me: Little rubies are glistening against the trees’ damp, gray bark. When did they pop out? Based on the size of the red buds, it was days ago.

I pull the blinds all the way back and crank open the casement window over the table. Widening sunlight and the fresh, cold air wash over my face as I look closer at the buds. How could I have missed them? But there they are, dazzling in the surprisingly golden morning, right at eye level as though I lived in a tree house. I stand there, awed. And in the millisecond it takes for that rosy picture to splash from my optic nerve to my brain, my locked-down heart swirls open a little, just enough to spark the hope that still lingers there. Small but real, it’s enough. It can lead me out. I know what to do.

Ding! goes the microwave. I put the teabag in the hot water and sit the mug on the kitchen table, feeling purposeful for the first time in ages. In the living room, I dig through the near-permanent pile of magazines and books at one end of the couch to unearth my buried journal. I notice how all the books are memoirs and personal essays. That makes sense — I’ve been reading to find out how other people cope with the difficulties of their lives.

Now, though, it’s time to take a shot at discovering how to cope with mine.

Back at the kitchen table, so close to the trees I could caress branch tips through the window, my pen flies across the spiral-bound pages of my journal, filling each line from end to end, each page from top to bottom, hardly able to keep up with the flow of words. This act of writing down uncensored thoughts, meant for no eyes but mine, is terrifically liberating — a fact I’d forgotten, or squelched, a while back, when some new punch to the gut had finally been too much even to record. I write without the usual constraints — grammar, precision, editing, is it good enough? The only rule is to keep the pen moving no matter what, following the river of words that dredges up little gifts from my subconscious, those nuggets enclosing the real treasures buried under all the muck.

Somewhere in all the scribbling, the knowledge I have been searching for all these months flows from pen to page: “I am stuck.” This simple realization is so obvious, I laugh and stop writing for a moment. But it’s perfect. It’s the chink in the mortar that starts the whole wall tumbling.

“I am stuck” — I know exactly where this nugget comes from. Over the years, I’d read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance several times, drawn back to it again and again, and each time understood more. In 1993, Pirsig’s words about being stuck helped me make the break into freelance writing. At a time when I was stuck firmly in the belief that the only way to support myself was to be an employee of some company, they gave me the courage to liberate myself from a writing job that riddled me with anxiety. Pirsig believed that being stuck was actually a wonderful place to be: It’s “the predecessor of all real understanding,” he wrote.

This morning, I know how right he is.

When we’re mired in the muck, it’s because we’ve exhausted all our usual options. The feeling of stuckness comes from applying traditional thinking and behavior to new situations and having them not work, repeatedly. The only way to free ourselves is to try something new.

I begin writing again, more blue ink curling even faster onto the journal page. A possible solution appears: “Maybe instead of going forward or backward, right or left, it’s time to go up or down. Time to fly or to retreat to the depths for a while to see what you can find there.”

I’m not ready to fly just yet, weighed down with this emotional baggage I do not quite know how to release or otherwise handle. But the notion of retreat is appealing. Not giving up, but simply being quiet, going fallow for a time and understanding that this is not my season for planting but for simply remembering how new life is always stirring beneath the surface, no matter what’s going on up top.

Several well-meaning friends have suggested I “take something” to feel better. Certainly, drugs can be a godsend for people with true severe depression. But my sadness or melancholy or grief is not clinical depression — it’s a normal, even healthy, response to all the painful situations of late. I want to feel all my emotions, not bury the difficult ones under a pavement of unnecessary drugs where they can flourish like toxic mold. Dealing with them directly might strengthen or nourish me for the future. I’m not a martyr; Thomas Moore’s eloquent book, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, explained this to me several years ago. “The soul presents itself in a variety of colors,” he wrote, “including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve of only white, red, and orange — the brilliant colors.” From Moore I had learned that painful feelings can lead to a place of transformation, if only we can accept, even embrace, them as part of the human experience.

Several years ago, my best friend’s husband deserted her for another woman. The betrayal pierced Lynda so deeply, she feared she’d go crazy with it. After taking an antidepressant for a short time, she could sense that her most profound emotions were sealed beneath the surface. Even though she needed to express them in order to heal, she couldn’t not feel good. So she stopped taking the drug. In the end, what helped her most was expressing the dark colors of her soul. With the blessing of her counselor, she began to say whatever was on her mind, wherever she was. In all innocence, a smiling grocery cashier would ask, “And how are you today?” Lynda would reply honestly, sometimes with tears, taking several minutes to explain her devastation. “He cheated on me with his secretary for a long time,” Lynda would say. “And then he left me to go live with her.” The stunned clerk would look embarrassed for this bereft woman in front of her, but Lynda would leave the store relieved for her honest revelation. Later, she said this was one of the best things she did for her recovery.

I stop writing to sip my tea, and it’s cool. As it warms in the microwave, I stretch and wiggle my fingers after clutching my pen and writing hard for nearly half an hour. I realize what a fierce grip I’ve been keeping on my emotions all these months, fighting so hard to appear normal and keep on in the same way I always had, despite the emotional pounding.

Yes, that’s the reason I’ve been so shrouded in pain: It’s not my fear of losing Mom or the grief over my sister’s loss, or my own loneliness and disappointment that have been weighing me down so much as my resistance to acknowledging those emotions. So often I say, “I’m fine,” when in fact I’m desolate. Unlike Lynda, I haven’t been brave enough to drop the façade. That’s what has left me stuck and walled in.

Under this onslaught of one crisis after another, my life right now isn’t painted in Moore’s brilliant colors at all. But denying my darker-hued feelings has only increased the pain. There’s a saying, “What we resist, persists.” The rest I need, my time for going fallow, will begin when I simply accept that I’m in pain, and that being in pain is a perfectly acceptable, even necessary, part of being human.

With my now-warm tea, I sit down again at the table but not to write. My journaling today has done its job and feels complete for now. So I simply sit back to relax, hands cupped around the warm mug, and again look out the kitchen window.

Those maple buds have blessed me with their rosy grace. Every year, they sprout and grow, then fall and go fallow, and then they start all over again. I declare this my fallow time, for as long as it takes. Healthy transformation will not be possible unless I give it time to root itself, down deep in the moistness and the quiet and the dark. Rejuvenated by the simple movement of pen on paper, I am no longer fighting my emotions. Instead, I will honor them, allowing whatever transformation awaits to take hold.