Tag Archives: contemplative

The Gifts We Bring

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“Do you know that you are the gift?”, a wise man once asked me.  Hearing these words from my teacher and friend generated a flood of relief within me.  We were on the phone only days before Christmas and I was expressing my desire not to lose myself amidst all the pressure and expectations of the holiday.   Absorbing the meaning of this simple question allowed me to relax, to unwind from my tightly coiled state of nervous anticipation, and to breathe and find the ground beneath me. It also allowed me to move through the days that followed with more grace and ease than I would have previously thought possible.

So today, in my tense, wound-up state of efforting – of trying to manage, strategize, prepare, plan and perfect – I stop and ask myself:  “Maggie, do you know that you are the gift?”  Do you know that even without “doing” anything that you are a gift to those you love, just as you are?

This truth is easy to glimpse, but easier to forget.

Thankfully, I was reminded of this question recently.  I was attending a yoga & writing retreat to help myself remember, well, myself, and to attempt to get grounded before the chaos of Christmas time.   Though I am desperate to remember and honor the truth and the spirit of the holiday season, it is difficult to stay present and not get consumed by outer-focused doing.   Having another tiny human being who demands ALL of my attention ALWAYS doesn’t help.  But it’s hard even without that, honestly.   So it takes planned and intentional moments, like this retreat, to stop and take the time and space to turn inward and get into my body to sit, reflect, write, and remember.

When it came time to write, the prompt came in the form of another poignant and well-timed question, this time from a wise woman (the group’s facilitator):

“What are the gifts that you bring the world – the ones that live inside you?”

This question, like the one so helpful to me years ago, I am receiving as a gift and a healing medicine this holiday season; to remember my own unique and innate gifts as a daily practice.

To say that it is not comfortable for me to claim my gifts confidently, out loud, is an outrageous understatement.  Our culture does not condone this.  It is not in my nature. The mere thought of it makes my skin itch from the inside out all over. And yet.  It feels vitally important somehow to break this unspoken code of conduct and do it — to transmit the gift all the way to anyone else who may want or need to receive it.

And so …

I name some of my own gifts here in the hopes that it might help you remember and celebrate your own inner gifts in this season of gift-giving.

  • I am open.  I am eager to listen compassionately and empathetically, without judgement.  I crave deep, meaningful conversation that brings light to darkened corners and possibly even allows healing to occur.  I can go deep inside the strength and source of myself to reflect back to you what I have heard you say, or what I haven’t heard.
  • I am a writer; always have been and always will be.  My relationship with stories, words, and language has been intensely intimate for as long as I can remember.  My life-long writing practice began with a diary in second grade wherein I expounded on the benefits of learning cursive, passing love notes on the bus, and the injury inflicted by being excluded at recess.  My ability to maintain the practice has ebbed and flowed over the course of my life, but it has been a constant touchstone to return to; a source of comfort and pleasure. Writing has also served as an entrance to self-reflection, healing and transformational work.  I am surprised and grateful for the revelations that occur in me when I stop long enough to reflect and write.
  • Writing is also my work, in one fashion or another.  I think this is so because I am skilled at distilling a story or an idea to its very essence and translating it into the words that best communicate that message; the story most wanting or needing to be told.
  • I can take a walk through the woods and notice things; tiny beautiful things all around me.  I may collect some of them to bring home and display on my hutch, my altar, my table to remind me of the beauty of the natural world when I am indoors, to create an opening to the calm feeling of sacred stillness that exists in me when I am in the forest.
  • I love fiercely and deeply.
  • Somehow, I find deep wells of patience in me even when pushed to my farthest edges by my dear little boy.  I can diffuse a power struggle with a song or by talking in a funny voice or growling like a tiger or by throwing myself into physical play and affection until rewarded by the most delicious peals of laughter. And sometimes I can’t – and I explode – but then apologize later.

Though I am trying to focus on my gifts, I notice how quickly feelings of shame, judgement, and inadequacy come crashing down on me as I think about those moments when I do not have the patience or compassion I wish I had as a momma.  Perhaps because those moments happen more often than I would like to admit.  However, in large part I can see that this most often occurs when my own need is so great that it is banging down the door, kicking and screaming for time to be quiet and alone — to be noticed, explored, and attended to.

So here I am attending to you, dear need, dear me; I will try to give you this gift more often in the coming year.  It feels like a precarious balancing act though, to weigh the needs of all equally.  I am trying to keep the great teeter totter of life, of marriage and motherhood, not at an equilibrium per se … but ever-moving … so that we all get to HAVE FUN.

Up.  Down.  Up.  Down.  Balancing it all may be the greatest work of my life. Today I am at the center, as I breathe and remember my gifts — and that even without doing anything at all — I am still the gift.

And so are you.

The Fitzsimmons 2015 - Clean (15 of 78)

Siren in the Night

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I am accustomed to hearing the emergency alert siren in Madison on a regular basis; it happens on the first Wednesday of every month at noon precisely. When I hear the siren begin to wind up into its high-pitch sustained whine, I pause to consider the day and time to confirm that it is only a test. My response to this conclusion is typically a mix of relief (that the sound doesn’t indicate an impending disaster), and slight irritation (that this grating noise is interrupting my day, albeit for only a few minutes).

I am NOT accustomed to being woken from a deep sleep in the middle of the night to hear this emergency siren, as happened earlier this week. At approximately 12:30am on Monday night, I woke to the sound of the siren.   It took my sleepy brain a few moments to register what was happening.   The siren was accompanied by thunderclaps loud enough to send the dog slinking over with her tail between her legs, shaking, and heavy rain – not falling in it’s typical downward trajectory but instead blowing horizontally, thumping against the house – making my bedroom feel like the inside of a car wash. Was this a tornado warning?? My first reaction was to grapple in the darkness for my smart phone to check the radar and verify the cause of the siren (hoping that somehow my technology was smarter than the siren and would indicate that I could go back to sleep). But before I could locate any information, Ken walked into the room and announced the tornado warning.  He’d first heard about it on Facebook, which he’d just happened to be perusing after midnight while unable to sleep – confirming that the news still travels fastest via the smartest technology of all — social media.

A more youthful and childless version of myself – feeling invincible and relying on a belief that surely tornadoes didn’t touch down in the middle of the city – may have thrown a pillow over my head and gone back to sleep.  But the stakes are higher now, and any recklessness I may have felt in the face of danger has been replaced with fierce protective instincts to keep my family and myself safe. Despite these strong instincts, Ken and I did hedge for a few moments weighing the consequences of being swept away in a tornado against waking the baby. While we usually do everything within our power to keep the baby asleep, this seemed like an appropriate exception.

Fortunately Mattie barely stirred when Ken picked him up and minimal rocking and shushing noises kept him asleep for the tiptoed trip through the house and down two flights of stairs into our basement. We settled down to wait out the storm in a nest of blankets from the laundry pile near the washing machine; me rocking and nursing my sleeping boy and Ken watching the radar on his phone.

Even though I still thought the likelihood of the tornado affecting us was small (yes, some of that invincibility still lingers), I felt afraid and imagined a variety of potential grisly outcomes.   But I was also struck by the timeless quality of this scene in the basement (minus the smart phone), and it made me think about all of the other mothers that have huddled over their babies in the darkness while sirens wailed around them. I imagined the fear a mother might feel while under the threat of an air raid or some other kind of enemy attack. Or of the mothers who knew that a tsunami or an earthquake was coming, but had no safe place to take shelter with their babies.

Maybe this was a coping mechanism of my mind – to imagine another scene to take me out of my own. Whatever it was, it instilled feelings of kinship with these mothers to know, if only for a few moments, the fear of a real potentially life-threatening disaster.

Like any mother, I feel tiny flutters of fear for the life of my child on a daily basis; the kind of fear that causes my heart to feel like it has momentarily dropped into my stomach while at the same time I forget how to breathe. This is usually caused by a close call of one variety or another, like when he almost falls from the top of the slide on the playground, almost runs into the street when a car is coming, or almost slips and falls in the bathtub.  I sometimes joke that my day consists of protecting Mattie from one life-threatening event after another, but today I am grateful for the normalcy and relative smallness of these everyday events.

On Monday night, the siren stopped after a short time (10 minutes?) and we knew it was safe to go back to bed, which we did gratefully. The next morning, I read in the paper that the tornado did in fact touch down in the middle of the city, even snapping trees, damaging property, and felling power lines on streets walking distance from my own.   While my mind drifted to the fates of those less fortunate than myself, maybe the fear that I was experiencing (and simultaneously avoiding) was more real than I dared consider.

At noon on the first Wednesday of next month when the emergency warning siren blares, I expect to feel more relief and gratitude than irritation. And perhaps I’ll even think to use it as a moment of ceremony, to remember all of those other mothers who visited me in the basement on Monday night; those who were able to return to bed like me, relieved and grateful that the threat of danger had passed, and those whose lives were lost or forever changed by a siren in the night.

 

Resistance and Snow

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Wow.  It’s been almost a month since I’ve been here.  I have a couple of excuses, and at least one of them is pretty good.

My biggest work project of the year was announced the week of Thanksgiving, with a February 24th deadline looming.  All of my “spare” time is now spent frantically trying to move that project forward.   This is my “good” excuse.

The other “not so good” excuse is that I keep wanting to (eloquently & comprehensively) define what this blog is about for me.   And when I try to sit down and do that, I get completely overwhelmed by the vastness and complexity of it, and quit.  So for the moment, I’m giving up on definitions and allowing myself to relax into more fluidity and imperfection.

Each week I attend a contemplative writing class with a small circle of women, wherein we meditate together for 10 minutes, write for 20 minutes in response to the prompt from our instructor, and then share what we write with one another in the remaining time. It’s a wonderful practice, and it’s one thing I can rely on to get me to write every week.  And because we write for 20 minutes, there’s no time to go back and edit or make it perfect – what comes out is very stream of consciousness – but  can be amazing and often surprising.

This week I was feeling a lot of resistance to writing about winter (the prompt), so I got up and grabbed a few brightly colored note cards.  I started by drawing a few snow flakes with a sparkly pen, and then this is the story that came out.  Each time I start a new paragraph, it’s because I ran out of space and flipped over to a new side of the note card.  It had an interesting effect…

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 “No.”

This is how Mattie pronounces the word “snow”.  It’s darling.

It can be easy to confuse with the word “n-o”, given that he’s been using a LOT of that one lately also, to convey what he doesn’t want.  No breakfast, no lunch, no dinner.  Only snacks and sweets and mama milk, thank you very much.  No medicine, no brushing teeth, no sitting in his high chair, no taking a bath, and especially no removing him from precarious situations (like standing on the end table, for example).   These have been his preferences the past few days, much to our chagrin.  With each refusal we learn something – about ourselves, and how we think to handle each interaction.  Parenting — the greatest self-discovery tool of them all.

But Mattie has also been beyond fascinated with the s-n-o-w version of “no”, drawn to pull Ken and I by the hand to look at it out the window, leading us to the door to let us know that he wants to go out in it.  It’s not easy for him to understand that we can’t just walk out onto our front porch barefoot anymore.  And the resistance and the n-o version of the word “no” come back in full force when it comes time to putting on his snowsuit…and his boots…and his hat…AND his mittens.  It takes great patience and psychological preparation for the shrieking battle these simple actions can invoke.

Once outside, bundled against the cold, calm returns.  It is an incredible relief to close the door behind us, leaving that particular moment behind, never to have to be repeated in exactly the same conditions.  I’m thinking of this in terms of contractions right now.  I remember living through a really painful, intense contraction and telling my midwife that I didn’t know how many more like that I could handle.  She told me that EVERY contraction is different and that I’d never have to do THAT one again.  Sometimes I think of parenting moments like that too.

But these last few days have been so bitterly cold and windy that the feelings of serenity don’t last long.  I put Mattie in his sled and pull it with one hand, grab Girl’s leash with the other and set off down the sidewalk, determined to get some sunshine and exercise for all.  But the gusting winds blow s-n-o-w into our faces, causing us each to gasp simultaneously, forcing us to return to the house in less time than it took us to leave it.  We return too soon, leaving at least one of us feeling dejected and disappointed.

Thank goodness we have the fire in the pellet stove to return to.  There is comfort there, at least, and from its warm and cozy glow we can look out the window together, pointing at the s-n-o-w “no”, talking about how cold it is out there.  Mattie signing the world cold is delightful – he puts both hands out in front of him in fists and clenches them (and his whole body – including his teeth and jaws) and makes a grunt like he’s exerting himself strenuously.  Uummhhh!  It’s awesome.

All of this until the next day, when we’ll likely repeat some version of the same maddening, frustrating, delightful dance of n-o “no” and s-n-o-w “no”.

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After thought:  It didn’t occur to me until after I published this post that there was another irony that I failed to note in my preamble.  I was feeling a lot of resistance to the writing prompt…and then I ended up writing all about Mattie and his resistance and how that impacts me.  So…interesting!