Pardon me, while I jump in here with an announcement. Beginning March 16 and continuing for three consecutive Saturday afternoons, I will be facilitating a course I developed called Embodied Edges: Feminine Mystics and Prophets. If you are interested in taking a look at what it means to inhabit “edge space,” what your own edge spaces and those of your community might be, then join me for an exploration of poetry and prose by women writing from the spaces in between and outside what we consider traditional or mainstream.
Here’s the link for more information.
Poetry
I spent a lot of time looking for a poem that “worked” with this newsletter’s theme. I didn’t find one. So I’m going to give you, not one, but three poems that explore refuge, living, and being. Let me know if one sparks for you and why. Also, if you have favorite poem on refuge or “being,” please share it in the comments.
Jim Harrison’s poem, “Return” from Songs of Unreason
Jill Osier’s “Refuge”
And Jeanne Lohmann’s “To Say Nothing But Thank You”
Journeying
I have a habit of keeping the dictionary page for particular words and their definitions open on my phone. These are words that hold some importance for me at the moment and that I want to sit with, to let my understanding of them unfold over days or months. “Refuge” is one of these words. According to Oxford Languages, a refuge is “something providing shelter” or “a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble.” At the time, I knew the word was important because I had lived without its manifestation for most of my life. While I have never gone without physical shelter, I grew up without emotional and financial security that resulted in a sense of self dependent on the whims of others. I wasn’t safe unless everyone else was happy. I could never relax and had no place to hide. I pursued shelter, a home for this wandering, ghost-girl self, for much of my adult life. And I found it, in a healthy relationship with my partner, in the secure family we created, one neither of us experienced as children, in each of the gardens I have grown, and most importantly, in a tangible sense of self both discovered and built through much inner healing.
I don’t remember what prompted me to close the dictionary page on my phone and remove “refuge” from my daily awareness. However, last week the word appeared again, at the swimming pool, but not before I encountered another important word. Earlier that morning, I had talked with my therapist about my spinning brain and skittish body and how I would like to find more stability for both, to which she eventually replied, “so you really just want to be.” Yes. That’s what I want. And yes, I have spent many years encouraging myself to be, through meditation, exercise, gardening, with spiritual companioning clients, with nature. These practices and spaces slow my mental activity and calm my body. In them, I am. But when my therapist spoke it, the word “be” struck me just a bit differently than it had the many other times I’d heard it. It spoke to my current and particular flavor of non-being, the one where I was adept at watching my mind and body do gymnastics but exhausted by the show. In that moment, I realized that I could “be” in a way I hadn’t in the past. I took this new understanding to the pool.
I love swimming. I have written about how it soothes my anxiety and lifts my depression, how it has healed me, and helps me feel safe. But being in the pool with other swimmers and a lifeguard can also cause my finely tuned fight or flight instrument to go haywire. While I move my arms and legs in rhythm with my breath, my nervous system sizzles, pops and explodes like oil in a pan, doing its best to convince me to flee the cavernous pool space and all of those eyes for the relative shelter of the locker room. My brain, in turn, responds to my body’s plea by frantically explaining why we need to stay in the pool, the exercise will help our mental health and contribute to our longevity. Then it details exactly how we should calm down (“don’t pay attention to what other people think,” “no one is looking at us anyway”) and as a closing argument, demonstrates why we remain crazy and wrong (“you’re 52 for god’s sake, no one cares what you look like” and “you should definitely not be dealing with this after 17 years in the pool”) for having such ridiculous reactions. My experience of swimming can also be like this. And that is what I encountered when I entered the pool after my morning therapy session.
While I swam with my noisy brain and body, I remembered the word “be.” “I could be ‘here,’” I thought. So I pulled my anxious attention away from the other bodies in the pool, the guard, and placed it on the black line at the bottom of the pool. My mind cleared and pretty soon even the line disappeared. I was meditating, looking at nothing at all. I was. My body still had to work though. Muscles complained; lungs screamed. I focused on these physical feelings and the emotions they produced. My body and emotions quieted, stilled by attention. I continued to swim, returning over and over to myself in the moment. And that is when the word refuge reappeared. Without the clutter of so many frantic thoughts, my brain could notice what mattered. It saw that I had created a refuge, a shelter for myself right there in the pool. I didn’t have to run for the locker room or wait until I was alone in my house with the door locked to feel safe, relaxed. Attention to being had accomplished that for me. I had become my own refuge.
Later in the locker room, I realized that I could take this boundaried space with me when I left the pool, could carry it with me wherever I went. Wherever I chose to “be,” it would appear. Instead of feeling like I walked around naked most of the time, everything fragile and private exposed, I could don a heavy, warm, protective coat to shelter and ground me, to give me courage and agency, to allow me to be myself. I wondered what other places this sense of refuge would take me and what I could be in them.
Gardening and Making/Mending
We have had extremely warm weather followed by cold weather and then more warm weather. Many people say that this is indicative of spring in Nebraska. I agree; I would also agree that this is indicative of climate shifts. While the crocuses are beginning to bloom a month early and other bulbs emerge from the ground ahead of schedule, my Witch Hazel is right on time. This is the second year I’ve had this plant, and its tiny spidery yellow blossoms always surprise me. They bloom on what looks like dead stalks amidst truly dead leaves. Incongruent amongst so much brown and grey, they are a promise. I have ordered and received all of my seed packets for the upcoming gardening season. I order from several catalogues to get what I want, and the process of sorting through and making decisions, then purchasing brings me much joy while also consuming a lot of time. My light and green-starved brain, seduced by the bright, colorful pages, always orders more than I can squeeze into the garden.
Here is a long neglected sweater I began knitting for my partner about a year and a half ago. I’ve knit him one sweater already, and he asked for another one. I don’t blame him. Hand knit sweaters are precious. However, the bigger the person, the longer the knit, and while my partner is not overly large, he is several inches taller than me, with an understandably longer torso and arms. The act of knitting a sweater for him is a commitment, and this one has a long way to go to fulfillment. I would like to finish it by next winter. Fortunately, I impose my own deadlines and can move them at will.
Such great reflections! After decades of chasing external salvation and places of peace, I finally relaxed into the most unconditional and lasting refuge—similar to what you share as “attention on being” or what I might call “awareness as refuge”, this is where I always feel safe, always still.
Emily, A very powerful piece. I particularly like this line 'It spoke to my current and particular flavor of non-being" Well done D