Rollercoaster Ride to Surrender

On mortality, surrender, our capacity for wonder even in the midst of misery, and how our tools influence what we create

Don’t underestimate the power of thinking about someone kindly, singing a song, putting flowers in the corner as an offering of beauty to life; of creating a beautiful dinner table, treating your body kindly; of making art, playing, or creating ritual and ceremony. All of these actions create our world.

~ Chameli Gad https://awakeningwomen.com/

This is my first official post on my new Small Wonders Substack. The other few earlier posts were imported over from Patreon. I am super excited about this platform and the myriad possibilities it offers. It will take some time to get used to it, but I think it will be wonderful.

Weekly Wonders

The light shimmering on the water in the canal, the dried leaves on the path crinkling under my feet, the late autumn colors of russets, browns, and old yellows—all of it seems a wonder.

Even as a part of me is lost in my terrible problems, this capacity for wonder stays alive within somewhere. I’m fascinated by that. Do you notice that too, if you look for it?

Update from the Wonder Factory

This week has been a total rollercoaster ride.

My thoughts and emotions have been up and down wildly—insights and openings followed by fear and depression. Yesterday is a perfect example.

I woke feeling despair about my health, which has been difficult and I don’t know what’s going on in there and what to do about it. Don gave me a treatment, uncovering stuck emotions and old beliefs that were limiting me, connected to the health issues.

I went for a walk on the irrigation canal and worked through a layer of feelings and beliefs and was feeling really good.

Then, I got news that my most recent bloodwork shows an increase in a tumor marker—and this after nine weeks of intensive and expensive IV vitamin therapy. Shock, despair, confusion, fear. I have used up all the tools I know for treatment. I have also used up all of the funds I raised and can’t possibly fathom asking for more.

This news could destroy our plans to move to Costa Rica. It could destroy everything. Or it could not.

I don’t know what to do next. Not yet. The only thing that is utterly clear is I am being asked to surrender completely. That is the invitation and the challenge. The only answers will now come not from the mind or research, but from Grace, if they come.

Everything in my life feels so tentative these days. Mortality hangs around me, questioning every plan or dream I have. Not just the threat of death, but seeing how life can upend our plans in a thousand un-expected ways. And yet, I still have to make plans.

If I don’t buy the concert ticket because I might not be well enough to go that night, or I don’t schedule classes because what if I can’t keep teaching them, or I don’t dream big because I might not be here at all, then I am letting my life be ruled by fear. And I am determined not to do that.

This post about reckless abandon by poet Maggie Smith was helpful to me this week. Perhaps it will be helpful to you too.

Wonder Spark

I was gifted a small yellow notebook for my birthday. It’s just 4” x 6”. As a writer, I’m gifted little notebooks with some regularity and I often have a hard time find a use for them. This is such a lovely notebook that I decided I would challenge myself to write one short poem on each page of it, at no particular pace.

Writing short poems does not come easily to me and I don’t consider myself good at it. So this is a real challenge. But I thought it was a good way for me to capture images/wonders and my responses to them in poetry.

The amazing American poet William Carlos Williams was a master of the short poem. His most famous is “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem I love:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician and often wrote his poems on prescription pads between seeing patients. People say this is why the lines in his poems are often so short, because the pads are small.

The format and tools you use—large or small paper, computer, pen, pencil, marker, or whatever your materials in your art form are—can greatly influence what you create.

When I spent a month at the Vermont Studio Center, an artists’ colony, I tried writing a pantoum on giant sheets of artist’s paper laid on the floor, using a large marker. I worked in a frenzied state on this poem for eight hours one day, then revised it. The result is a poem I call “Meditations on Desire,” which was published in The Louisville Review. It’s still a beloved poem of mine to this day.

The unfamiliarity of the large paper and marker and the challenge of the pantoum form broke something open in me.

Here’s your Wonder Spark for this week:

Try changing your format/canvas, materials, and/or the tools you use to create with. Try something quite unfamiliar to you. See what opens up in your art. Share your results here if you’re willing!