Over the course of my cancer treatment, and several months after, I attended weekly writing sessions with a UCSF Art & Recovery cancer support group. Each time we met, our facilitator would give us a couple prompts, we’d spend a few minutes writing, and then read our scribbles aloud to each other. Sometimes they were painful, filled with grief or resentment or the imminent and very real fear of dying. Other times they would be hopeful, an outpouring of gratitude for being alive at all. Always they were a peek into someone’s inner world and served as a release valve to things unseen.
I was rummaging through some of the pieces I wrote and here is an entry from last year. The prompt was: what place in your life offered you an epiphany or revelation? Or just grounding sanctuary and peace?
May 19, 2022
Every morning I take my dog, Millie, to Robin Williams Meadow in Golden Gate Park. There’s a small section where dog owners and their frantically happy pups take over in the early mornings. As soon as I detach Millie from her leash, she sprints a massive circle around me. It’s only one big circle, just letting herself catch the wind and run as fast as she can. She glances at the other dogs, and sometimes will play, but most times prefers to explore on her own. Sometimes she’ll wander to the trees and smell the flowers. She’ll stare down the gophers in their holes, looking back at me with confusion and excitement. She loves to close her eyes and walk slowly through the tall grass as it brushes her face. She’s so much more tender when she can disappear in nature.
I was very nervous to let her off-leash the first time. I was afraid she’d run away —that she’d get scared and disappear down the path. But the more freedom I gave her, the more she wanted to be near me.
Watching her run expands the space inside my chest. Like I’m running, too. And while I’ve been slow to moving my body again, I feel like I’m getting closer just by watching the joy on her face.
I’m learning how to call on that same freedom. When it’s given by friends, family, partners, it allows me to feel even closer to them. When I’m given the freedom to be myself, to run free, to express and emote as deeply as I need to, when that kind of freedom is given, I always feel closer to the people I love. And when they get some sort of joy or expansion from seeing how meaningful this freedom is to me, it makes it all the more special.
Nearly a year later, I’m still in careful study of how to balance this sense of freedom while not detaching myself so much that I feel isolated. This will likely be a life-long study, as it is for many who chart a path of creative work.
I love the permission to reinvent oneself that only detachment can provide. I love the space to examine, to dive deeply, to self-reflect and emerge as something new entirely. The power in living not just one life, but many lives. I like the liberation in knowing I can be anyone I want to be if given enough time away outside the categorical boxes others have put me in, or more likely, I have put myself in. To detach is to claim that freedom.
However, I am also in need of cuddles and intimacy and conversation and connection. I am in need of play. I am in need of gophers, of spontaneity and awe. I am in need of validation, of someone recognizing I exist. I am in need of love. I am in need of growth.
And all these things require a return to the world as it is our greatest mirror, reflecting back all the things we worked so diligently on in the dark corners of our own space. It’s in this return that we garner the full credit of our courage. Not from others, but from that deep seed sprouting in our soul that shouts this feels different, I am growing! If we never return to the world, how will we know this courage fully?
But, when the world (especially that of the virtual kind) feels like a jackhammer of reverberating noise, the silence of my own company is a seductive and time-consuming sanctuary.
Last week, one of my favorite writers
wrote a piece on this freedom, particularly from social media, in her issue titled intimacy portals. And it begins like this…In the privacy portal of no social media I find myself infinitely more free than I imagined. As I rise with the sun my mind is clear from hundreds of opinions, projects, ideas, and feelings that are not my own. I do not go on a search for signs of my inadequacy, my unlovability, or how I measure up to others. The insidious voice of doom fades away, one that was more persistent than I was aware of.
I awake rested, hopeful, and eager to notice where I may find and attune myself to real intimacy, not the intimacy projected on to me in a digital sphere, nor the intimacy I project that others expect of me. My portal becomes small and I become big within it.
My portal becomes small and I become big within it. *sigh*
The homework for me moving forward is to pay attention to rhythm of both — when it is time to draw back and retreat to the magic and wonder of my own private space, my own intimacy portal, and when it is time to re-enter the world once more. Living full-time in either place would not be fully living at all. So I must continue to mind the dance.
What does this dance look like for you? What rhythm does it take? Tell me.
Until next time,
B.