Tag: Relationships

Under a Sepia Sky

Terah Van DusenLeave a comment

Sunday

It was September 6, 2020. The sun appeared like an eraser tip in the sky – gray, muted and small. Usually in September the sun was a bright yellow beach ball shining down over our homestead halfway between Eugene and the Oregon coast. There were high winds. We never got high winds. Smoke appeared to be coming over the mountainside and our sheep were hunkered down in a huge heap out in the pasture. Within days, record wildfires would burn more acres of national forest land than had been burned in all the previous 36 years combined. They’d even give it a special name, the 2020 Labor Day Fires. But we didn’t know any of that yet.

When the smoke settled in and the electricity companies turned off the power, I closed and locked every single window and door in our manufactured home. I didn’t know if locking the windows made a difference, but our home wasn’t that airtight. It was something we struggled with in the winter. If we didn’t have a fire going in the woodstove, we woke up to temperatures near what it was outside.

Wildfires were burning on the other side of the valley. Flames licked up and down the McKenzie River corridor, people’s lives were in danger and farm animals were being transported to the fairgrounds.

“Why, mama?” Our child, who was barely verbal, asked me of the locked windows and doors. She wanted to run and play outside, like she had done during other moments of daylight in the summertime.

“Smoke,” was all I could respond.

Reading the news headlines was making me anxious, but I kept scrolling anyway.

“The Oregon Health Authority warned Saturday that wildfire smoke can exacerbate respiratory diseases, including Covid-19.” September 6, 2020 OPB.org

I retrieved two kerosene lanterns, wicks, and oil that I kept stashed for when the power went out, then set out to make a dinner of lemon and chicken on top of our woodstove. Years ago, a friend of ours had jokingly said that we were the couple he’d want to pair up with in an apocalypse. It was a nice thought, and far from the truth. How many millennials would actually fare well in a real, live apocalypse? That was the word that kept coming up, apocalypse.

On top of feeding, entertaining, and caring for our toddler, I was wondering how I would accomplish a Zoom conference the next day, type and submit an article for the paper, and how the helk we were going to care for all the farm animals given the current conditions.

If the smoke persisted, what would happen to the hundreds of chickens in our care? I stared out the window and feared the worst. I’d been working on a pastured poultry farm two summers prior and we’d suffered a few fatalities during a particularly smoky season. The smoke we were experiencing was already preceding that summer. The sky had been a strange shade of sepia for more than twenty-four hours. It was as if we were all stuck in a vintage photograph. But no one was using words like unprecedented or hazardous to describe the smoke just yet…that would come later.

In the morning, when the water ran out completely, I opened the cupboard where we kept roughly 10 gallons of emergency water in plastic jugs. My soon-to-be husband was working at another farm, his day job at that time, and Autumn was still asleep, so I carried three jugs of water out to our farm animals. Because there was no electricity, there was no pumping water into the water lines.

I watered the flock of sheep and quickly fixed up our chicken brooder, placing blankets over the top to replace their heat lamps. It was probably eighty degrees out, but little chicks need it to be closer to 95 degrees. I was relieved to see that the baby chicks still had one full waterer. I felt like crumbling under the stress, but instead I stepped outside the brooder and took a deep breath, with my hands cupped over my mouth to avoid the smoke.

I craned my neck looking at all the Douglas fir trees surrounding our property. They were towering over me. Dense forest everywhere. Suddenly, it was as if we were living in a matchbox, and all it would take was one spark. I’d lived in the forest for most of my life, but up until then I’d never feared it.

When my fiancé came home from work I was on edge, despite all the deep breathing. He gave me a quick, dry peck on the lips. We were running out of water from our “apocalypse” stash, I told him. He said he didn’t think watering the farm animals with water from our home stash had been such a good idea.

“You take care of the farm, and I’ll take care of Autumn,” I told him through gritted teeth.

Monday

On Monday, Labor Day, I’d been scheduled to pick up twenty 50lb bags of chicken feed from a mill fifty miles north of us, but on route in our minivan with Autumn in tow, the smoke, high winds and impending fires had me feeling unsafe. I explained all of that to the mill’s owner over the phone when I turned around halfway. It was clear that he was less than impressed that I’d been unable to follow through. Tensions were high. What kind of farm wife was I?

After returning from work, my fiancé promptly left to purchase a generator. He was also going to pick up the chicken feed: my failed mission. He didn’t mention the massive water shortage issue. I knew he was dealing the best he could. It wasn’t his fault he’d been asked to pick vegetables all day in the smoke. He had a job to do. More than one, in fact. Same as me.

I paced around the house, looking out all the windows into the sepia haze. It was day two of no power, no water, and lots and lots of smoke. The sheep were grazing out in the pasture, though they didn’t appear to be eating. I felt horrible for them.

The week before, my biggest concern was catching the Coronavirus. This week I was mentally packing our go-bag. I wondered what other families were doing right then: fashioning air filters out of box fans, purchasing brand-new air filtration systems, watering their lawns and roofs. I felt like a sitting duck and I didn’t like the feeling. I was resentful that farming was demanding so much of my fiancé’s energy and time. I had Autumn to care for…and my own work deadlines to meet!

Thick, mucusy smoke was seeping in through the floorboards and flimsy doors. Our shared objective became to open and close the door as quickly as possible. There was our border collie, Cedar, who was coping with all of this as well.

I ran into our neighbor, an avid outdoorsman, out near the water pump. “I’ve been preparing for this my whole life,” he said to me, cloaked in camo. It was true, he had a generator, and other fancy, survivalist-things. 

But watching him cart large 5-gallon blue water containers out of the back of his full-size truck while his four-year-old ran circles in the thick smoke, I didn’t know if I was impressed, envious, or repulsed by how he was reacting.

“Yeah?” I responded. I was thinking, Well you can’t survive in the woods if they’re literally burning down around you.

I kept mentally packing my go-bag. Although our neighbor offered me one of his 5-gallon water containers, my pride, or something, wouldn’t allow me to take it. Probably a stupid decision on my part. Had I taken it, it may have changed the trajectory of our next few days. It might have allowed our family to stay together.

It felt as if the disaster was throwing people into camps: Survivor. Dependent. First Responder. We were all reacting so differently to the stress of the wildfires – which were colliding with our already fragile psyches, beaten down after a year of pandemic isolation and political and social discord. The clock felt as if it were ticking slower and slower. Of course it was just the numbers displayed on my cellphone screen that I was going by. I had to run my vehicle in order to charge it. My one source of information and communication never displayed more than two bars of charge at any given time.

I tried not to let my fear show as I nursed Autumn. I didn’t cry. I didn’t complain. At this stage I was still nursing on demand, up to forty hours per week. I silently scrolled the news on my phone, hoping my eyes didn’t reveal the anxiety building within me. I couldn’t yet admit that I felt abandoned by my partner due to his lack of communication. I couldn’t yet recognize that rooted deep down inside me was a resistance to trusting anyone for anything. Maybe if he knew all of that then he would have acted differently and communicated more. The lack of control I felt over the situation led me to spiral. Somewhere inside me the reaction to take flight began stirring.

“More than 120,000 people lose power across the Portland Metro area due to a rare and powerful windstorm.” September 7, 2020 KPTV.org

I thought of my college friends in Portland. Pictured them with all their scented candles lit in their apartments, their fur babies and houseplants. This was affecting all of us, I knew. Due to the refrigerator losing power, I’d dragged a large cooler into the kitchen that I’d filled with ice packs. Inside was a half-gallon of milk, yogurt, and some leftovers in glass Pyrex dishes. I looked out at the sepia haze, longing for the electricity it would take to power our two box fans. I knew when Autumn’s dad returned with the generator, it would be used primarily to power the freezers in the shop, which contained all the meat he’d raised through his pastured poultry business.

It didn’t take long before I got to thinking about myself and Autumn independent of him. I thought about that quick, dry peck on the lips. I wasn’t crazy when I’d said, “You take care of the farm, and I’ll take care of Autumn.” Was I?

When I suggested packing a go-bag, I’d been met with an eye roll. I shook the image from my mind and retrieved a large plastic tote from the closet. I tipped it over on its side, letting gift bags and wrapping tissue fall to the floor. Autumn gleefully played with them while I placed the items inside the plastic tote from my mental go-bag list: diapers, wipes, three pairs of pants for each of us, three clean shirts for each of us, my laptop and charger, the lock box with our important family documents, a framed photo of my Grandma Peggy, a couple children’s books, and my memoir manuscript. Never go anywhere without my memoir. Not overthinking it, just operating on sheer instinct, I put our go-bag inside my white Dodge Caravan, snug behind the driver’s seat. I placed half a dozen apples, a bunch of bananas, and a frozen jug of water from the freezer into the cooler with the other food and hoisted that out to the van, too.

Desperate for information, and though I didn’t recognize it at the time, for connection, I pulled up the news on my cellphone as it charged in my van. A headline from KATU 2 News in Eugene jumped out at me: We should expect loss of life from this fire.

I started the van several minutes before our departure, windows rolled up, cool air circulating throughout. Then, acting on impulse, I retrieved Autumn from the house. Because she wasn’t speaking much yet, I wasn’t entirely sure how she felt. But I tried to maintain my ordinary cheerfulness and act like everything was normal. My initial plan was to fill up eight of our 2-gallon water containers and then return to the farm. But a part of me just wasn’t committed to coming back. As we drove away, images of flickering flames on the other side of the valley filled my brain. I could see our neighbor and his son in the rearview mirror, but barely.

I had everything we needed if we took refuge some other place. Some place with water and power, I was thinking. Some place kind of wet. Driving west toward the town of Mapleton, away from the fire up the McKenzie River corridor, I realized I didn’t really want to go back to the farm. I just didn’t feel completely safe there. With my history of trauma, it was likely I’d been suffering from PTSD my entire life. Safety, mine and my child’s, came above all else. I’d learned there was no one I could really rely on but myself. I hated to think that my soon-to-be-husband might be unintentionally reinforcing that belief.

I remembered what I’d told him, “You take care of the farm, and I’ll take care of Autumn.”

I hoped he would understand, but naturally I was afraid he wouldn’t. I couldn’t quite identify what was happening inside of me—a combination of fear and hope. Fear of wildfires, hope for safety. It was fight or flight, and I was flying. I wasn’t sensing my partner’s appreciation for caring for our daughter or holding it down on the homestead while he worked. Just criticism for what I wasn’t doing right. I pictured Imperator Furiosa in the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, only with a baby strapped to her back. I guess that’s who I was supposed to be channeling. It made me sad that I would never, ever come close to being anything like Charlize Theron’s character.

But I let my own personal power and instincts override my feelings of insecurity. This disaster was 100% reinforcing gender stereotypes. His work mattered, mine didn’t. To be fair, he did work with living things, and I didn’t. Overall it was just really hard for everyone to deal with. But I felt paralyzed in my role as a parent. Even more so with the wildfires. It was a change from the independent life I’d led before having a child. I couldn’t stop to help someone on the side of the road if I’d wanted to. She, a cooing, burbling baby girl, came first. Somebody, somewhere, had to understand. I didn’t know if we were in real danger at the farm or not—but I wasn’t going to stick around, managing the oil lanterns and the meals single handedly, while hazardous smoke crept up through the floorboards. We’d tore out all the ducts in the flooring because they’d been infested with rodents. So there was just less between us and the smoke. It was all coming down to how airtight your home was. Then I remembered Dad, in his modest cabin near the redwoods.

I appeared calm but was acutely aware of the coniferous forest waving in the high winds all around us as I drove. Just one spark. Maybe we’d head to northern California to ride out the storm, I was thinking. Shit, the Coronavirus. Not even family would want us showing up on their doorstep at a time like this. I kept driving toward Hwy 101 anyway, stopping in Mapleton to fill up the water, and call my closest cousin, Crystal, while Autumn napped in her car seat.

“No, girl, there’s fires down here, too,” Crystal informed me. “Interstate-5 is closed and it’s burning all between here and Medford.”

“What? Oh my god. But we’re coming down the coast,” I told her. “Do you think it’s any better in Crescent City?”

“The smoke isn’t any better in the Illinois Valley, but you can try Crescent City. I don’t even know if I could get to Crescent City if I wanted to. Hwy 199 might be closed, too,” she said, sounding as frightened as I was.

“What. The. Fuck. Do you guys have power at your house?”

“For now, but there’s talk of them shutting it off here in Grants Pass, too.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about the smoke there? Is it bad?”

“It’s so bad. It’s been like a thick, hazy and orange for a couple of days. And it’s getting worse.”

“Yeah, here too. I just left the farm. We have no power and no water.”

“What? Where are you going? Are you all together?”

“No, we’re not. It’s just me and Autumn. I was thinking of driving to Crescent City, but now I’m not so sure.”

Ashes were falling on the windshield. My headlights were pointed toward the coast, and even in broad daylight, the ash looked like snow lightly falling. If I squinted my eyes, I could pretend it was Christmastime in Montana, where we went every winter to visit my in-laws. I just wanted to breathe, and I felt unanchored, so we drove toward the ocean, fifteen miles away. Before I started driving, my phone vibrated and lit up. A quick glance told me it was an email reminder of my upcoming Zoom conference for work. Briefly wondering how I was going to justify my absence, I eventually laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. Wildfires. Coronavirus. Burbling child. Work can fuck right off.  

Tuesday

September 9, 2020 “Thousands evacuated as ‘once in a generation’ wildfires burn through Oregon” -Washington Post

Aerial image of west coast wildfire smoke on September 9, 2020. Credit: SciTechDaily

Finding a hotel room had been a beast. There were no rooms available in Florence or Coos Bay, and there was a wildfire up north in Lincoln City, preventing us from driving anywhere but south. I’d called the Best Western Inn in Bandon and, fortunately, they had a room. It cost $200 before taxes but since I had no other options, I told them we’d take it. I got a dog-friendly room, in case the rest of the family needed to take refuge there as well. The hotel was on the south end of town, near a beach called Face Rock.

After we dragged the cooler up the stairs, and settled into our hotel room, I opened my cell phone to check the wildfire news. A wildfire had ignited in Bandon (on the coast of all places!). They name it the North Bank Lane Fire. Fire officials were currently working to put out the blaze and it was 20% contained. The fire had started from a downed power line and had burned over 300 acres.

Meanwhile, the Holiday Farm Fire burning up the McKenzie River corridor was 0% contained and already 37,000 acres. The hazardous smoke had caused an air quality index of over 300 and rising in the Willamette Valley. On the coast, the AQI was 150, which is still considered unhealthy. One headline read that the air quality in western Oregon was worse than in Beijing. Aerial footage showed astounding images of plumes of wildfire smoke blanketing the west coast. I was shocked to see wildfires dotting entire mountain ranges in northern California and Oregon. The west was on fire and it was unprecedented in my lifetime.

Even though I knew there was a wildfire burning just a few short miles away, I felt safer than I had in days. Autumn and I quickly fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. Guilt tugged at my eyelids as I drifted off, and I tried to ignore it. I knew if it weren’t for my postal service union settlement money, none of this would have been possible. I thought I’d made the right decision coming to the coast and escaping the smoke, but I still wasn’t sure. My fiancé had been distant ever since I’d told him where we were.

Wednesday

To comfort and reassure myself, I analyzed the AQI information over my morning drip coffee. Children and the elderly were not supposed to be out in the hazardous air. I thought of my grandmother, who’d always been my closest confidant. I called her in Arizona to tell her about the craziness happening in Oregon. I let her know where we were and that we were safe.

“Yee-gads!” She responded. “That sounds absolutely awful. What about all those farm animals? Are they going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think about that, honestly. I’m on a deadline.”

I told her what I said about him taking care of the farm, and me taking care of Autumn. To my surprise, at the end of our conversation, she said she was proud of me. Something about my “maternal instincts.”

The things my grandmother was proud of sometimes came as a surprise to me. Like the time I got suspended for punching a girl in the nose during math class. That time, she was proud of me for standing up to a bully. The world wasn’t so black and white. It felt good to have someone on my side.

After the conversation with Grandma Peggy, Autumn and I ventured outside willingly for the first time in days. In the lobby, during check in, I’d learned that some people staying there had been misplaced due to wildfires. They were meant to be there. It was a last resort for them. For us, not so much. I didn’t want to let on that a wildfire hadn’t actually made it to our town. That we were just escaping the smoke.

We walked a narrow sandy path down to the shore. Above the sea, the sky wasn’t clear but the salty air was so satisfying that I ate it in gulps. It was like the ocean produced an atmosphere all its own. The freshness was a gift. Autumn didn’t act like she knew what was going on with the wildfires, but as she ran up and down the beach and for nearly an hour, I felt like maybe I had done something right. I felt like I had done something that made sense to me, even if it was a little privileged.

Autumn and another child social distancing amidst record wildfires and hazardous air.

That night I stayed up and wrote my article. Newspapers didn’t take days off. The writing came naturally. I wished I could sit there with my fingers pounding on the keys for days. Not only was writing a welcome distraction, it was also completely necessary. It simply had to happen, kid or not, and especially since I’d had to bounce on last Monday’s Zoom meeting. I needed a paycheck. Same as everyone else.

Thursday

Every day I called my fiancé to ask if we had any water on the farm yet. That would indicate whether we would go home or not. Even if the AQI was still 500, which it had risen to, I told him we would return if there was water. Despite a good friend of mine quipping “Well, have fun,” over the phone, I knew we weren’t on vacation. We needed a fair amount of water to cover the basic washing, cleaning, food prep, and cooking back home. I needed something to work with. A couple five gallon jugs, something.

The whir of helicopters outside became a constant, no matter where you were in western Oregon. A good sound or a bad sound, I couldn’t decide. There were still bone dry weather conditions and gusty winds. Dad had been evacuated. The Red Cross put him and others up in a hotel in Crescent City.

September 10, 2020 “Wildfires have burned over 800 square miles in Oregon” –Wildfire Today

Being from northern California, wildfires weren’t foreign to me. But they weren’t commonplace, either. I remember as a kid the first night I got a glimpse into the terror that fires can present. Late at night at my grandmother’s house, we were watching a program that detailed the 1991 fires in Oakland, California. My grandmother fell asleep and I, scared straight, pulled my covers up to my chin. I was obsessively envisioning orange embers tapping at the windows. I was terrified.

Naturally, I’d already come up with an escape plan from our Bandon hotel room. I knew that from our hotel room to the beach was approximately 264 steps. One step equated to roughly one second. So in four minutes, with Autumn strapped snug in her Ergopack, we could escape to the beach via the trail. Half the time if we were running instead of walking. The beach, where there were lots of rocks and sand. The beach, where there were no trees. Going down this rabbit hole in my mind led me to envision the National Guard rescuing people off the coast of Oregon. They would take us all out on boats, where we would see our former homes, our former habitat, aflame. A scenario, I later learned, that was not far removed from what played out on the coast of Australia during their unprecedented brush fires just one year prior.

Friday

September 11, 2020 “At least six people dead, more missing in Oregon wildfires” –OPB.org

Because of the high cost of the hotel room I was in, after a few days, I called around and found a cheaper room at the Red Lion Inn in Coos Bay.

Coos Bay was closer to the farm, where there was still no water, and where the AQI was still off the fucking charts. Moving hotel rooms was an almost shocking thing to do during the pandemic, as the goal was to prevent as much contact with others as humanely possible. I wiped down all the surfaces myself when we entered the hotel room.  

The truth was, at this point I was probably more likely to bring harm to us by catching the Coronavirus, stepping on a jellyfish on our daily excursions to the beach, or getting t-boned coming out of a coffee hut. I vowed to start paying more attention to things other than the smoking woodlands all around us. I didn’t want to put us in unnecessary danger. I needed to get a grip, but all I could do was grip my cellphone and consume whatever I could online about the unprecedented wildfires. I couldn’t spell out “wildfires” in my journal without putting the word “unprecedented” before it.

If you know anything about Paradise, California, you know that in the span of forty-five minutes the town was in a grid lock of bumper-to-bumper traffic with about 30,000 residents trying to flee and the police department hanging up on people due to the volume of calls.

“If you fear for your safety, even if you’ve not been evacuated, you can leave, ma’am,” a police officer reportedly said.

One minute it was falling ash, the next minute it was all up in flames. School children were reporting falling, flaming branches on the playground. People had underestimated mother nature’s fiery roar.

No one could believe it, except maybe the climate scientists.

Credit: ESRI.com

Saturday

Other farm families couldn’t afford what I was doing. Did that make it inherently bad? A girlfriend, who I’d spoken with on the phone, the one who’d said, “have fun,” was under the thumb of her long-term partner. She was scared too, I knew; and her kids would have really benefited from being able to run around on the beach like Autumn was. I invited them to stay in our room, but deep down I knew her partner wouldn’t “let” them. I also knew that domestic violence starts with being provided just enough to live by, but not enough to leave by.

Our world was quickly becoming divided by those who were going towards the flame, and those who were running from it. Me? I was clinging to a wet seashore. But I knew deep down that I was one who was built to go towards the flame, and that my newish role of “mother” was setting me apart. Whenever I could, I splayed my memoir pages out on the hotel room desk, revising furiously, as if the world were on fire. The guilt had me feeling like I should be “doing something.”

While she was sleeping, I stepped outside the hotel room door. I’d brought along my cannabis vape pen. I took a long drag, exhaled. The sky was still sepia-tinged. How strange it will look when it finally goes back to normal. Which it will, I assured myself. A blue heeler dog gulped at the air as he leaped and charged at birds in the parking lot. A cop car raced down the highway, sirens blaring. My body quickly reminded me how fragile my nerves were, jumping at the sound, which was so close, so loud. A single plastic bag floated in an algae-filled swimming pool below. I stared at it and thought of how void our current existence is of celebration. About how alive it is with fear. Then I stepped inside and logged onto Instagram, forgetting about the apocalypse for an hour or more, before calling again to ask about the water status. Wondering when we would return home. Wondering if it could ever be like it was before. If we could ever really go back.

My Greatest Teacher

Terah Van Dusen11 Comments

It’s been going on four years now, Dad. You’d be turning 63 years old in November. Now that I am turning 40 myself, I’m growing wiser (and more disillusioned) with every day. I’ve never been more aware of this stupid human suit I’m wearing. It’s incredible what a difference a few years makes. I wish I could tell you all I’ve learned since you departed. I would ask your forgiveness for the times I articulated your faults on the page, just trying to understand. I would tell you that I understand now. I get it more, Dad.

These are the words rattling around in my mind this afternoon: poverty is a systemic failure, not a personal one. After you died, I discovered that it was a measly ten thousand dollars standing between us and our dreams. I learned that if you hadn’t been literally robbed of your cash, we would have had a home–those sturdy walls and saloon doors we’d sketched out so carefully. Why didn’t you ever tell me that? About the time you got robbed of ten thousand dollars and everything changed?

Today, Aunt Julie shared a picture of us that I’d never seen. It was taken on my second birthday, outside the house on Glenn Street. Someone (was it you?) made me a sheet cake and spelled out my name in candy corn. What I love about the picture is that as I am blowing out my birthday candles, so are you. You were ever encouraging, attuned, a gentle wind at my back from day one. God, I look like Autumn in the photo. A few years ago, unwittingly, I also decorated her birthday cake with candy corn. October babies.

You don’t want to be forgotten, do you? I know this because every now and again you pop up. A photo I’ve never seen. Your song playing on the radio. Your initials emblazoned on a barn along the interstate. But most incredible are the thirty-some-odd handwritten pages I recently received from a relative, your descriptions of our early days together. How did it take me all this time to realize that it was you all along? That it was you, legally disabled but spiritually sophisticated, who inspired my love of writing? I wish I could tell you all I’ve learned since you’ve departed, because one thing I know for sure is that you’d be listening.

What I wouldn’t give to scramble up a hillside with you today, sit at the top, overlooking some vista, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Someday I’ll get to reading those pages you sent me from the great beyond. But honestly, it kind of hurts to do so. I opened it once and a line jumped out at me. It read, “I believe in simple living and high thinking.” What more do you have to teach me, Dad? Are you still the wind at my back? What can I do to not be robbed of ten thousand dollars? Anything?

Journaling Prompts for Trauma Healing

Terah Van Dusen2 Comments

Writing heals. Through the act of writing, we begin to understand ourselves more deeply. This is especially true for writers of memoir, personal essays, and poetry. We discover what matters to us. We learn what’s impacted us, and in what ways. The self-awareness gained through writing becomes a gift to oneself and others. Our journals becoming a place to lay down whatever worries we carry, large or small–with the option of sharing what we’ve written with others, or not. In my experience the act of writing is inherently healing, and the act of sharing our writing is inherently empowering. We discover that people can witness our darkest expressions and still accept us, maybe even love and respect us more knowing what makes us us.

In Spring 2023 I began guiding a weekly journaling workshop “Releasing With Writing” at the Trauma Healing Project in Eugene, Oregon. Since then I’ve witnessed how the process of putting words down on the page, and sharing those words aloud, peels back layers of the heart, generating more compassion for oneself and others. Throughout this journey I have relied primarily on my own creativity generating our journaling prompts (which I am sharing below). Because my own trauma healing was aided by writing memoir, many, though not all, of the writing prompts align with the memoir genre:

Write about your scars
Think about place you’ve lived and describe it in immense detail
Write about an object that holds special meaning for you
Write about a cherished photograph
Write about a time you were bullied/bullied someone else
Write about a time you gave/received love
Write what’s on your heart today
Write about the good old days
Make a list of the turning points in your life
Introduce us to your inner child
A mess you made
A blessing in disguise
A celebration
Survival mode
A reality check
A stranger angel
A beginning/An ending
A trip
Dirt
Fire
Hunger
Companionship
Something you regret
Something you didn’t think you’d survive
A recent adventure
A time you felt filled with hope
A date you’d like to remember/forget
A love letter to the town you live in
Describe a meal that holds special meaning for you
Write about your birthplace
Write about standing in another person’s shoes
Write about a time you were selfless/selfish
Write about a time you had to ask for forgiveness
Write about a time you spread/hid your light
Write about a time you felt free/trapped
Write a love letter to summer
Write a letter to your kid self
Describe your childhood hopes and dreams
Use color as the central point of meaning in your story
Something someone said that you’ll never forget
What’s your inner weather?
What is a big challenge you’re facing right now?
How can you be kinder to yourself this week? This year?
What is a personal belief you held in the past that has since changed?
What do you need more of right now, solitude or companionship?
What is your astrological sign? Do you relate to it? Why or why not?
What is something new you would like to try?
What would you do with unlimited resources?
What’s your superpower?
Where do you go to find yourself?
How do you prioritize self-care?
What do you want more of?
What matters most?
What are you afraid of?
What are you calling in/letting go of?
How do you balance your needs with the needs of others?
How has your definition of love evolved?
What can you let go of today?
What have you learned from your elders?
What advice would you give someone going through a hard time?
Write about a person you are grateful for. What do you admire about them? Why have they had such an impact on your life?
What is broken and needs fixing?
If this time in your life were a chapter, what would it be called and why?
What I remember was…
In this moment I am…

Feel free to use these journaling prompts yourself or in a group setting, and don’t forget to share your prompts with me in the comments section below!

Love and mysterious blessings,

Mama Bird

Book Reveal! Freeing Our Frozen Songs: Transmuting Pain to Power

Terah Van DusenLeave a comment

Hello faithful readers,

I trust the seasonal changes, wherever you may be, are inspiring you to slow down, go inward, and savor the feeling of autumn’s presence. Those things are certainly true for me. On top of it being a very special time of year, the time of year that my daughter and I both celebrate our birthdays, I am also celebrating another milestone: The upcoming release of our anthology “Freeing Our Frozen Songs: Transmuting Pain to Power.” I, along with nine other artists, collectively and intentionally created a book with the mission of generating more healing and acceptance in a sometimes harsh and apathetic world. Because I have yet to find a better way to reduce the shame and stigma of surviving, well, anything, than through storytelling.

Freeing Our Frozen Songs: Transmuting Pain To Power

Ten Oregon storytellers and visual artists are featured in this anthology. Our curator, Kirsten Fountain, believed in us, valued our individual stories, and honored us as the true experts in our lives. I am so proud to be revealing eighteen poems that I have never before shared. Poems that explore my own personal journey from pain to power.

I believe in not only witnessing, but honoring, celebrating even, the full spectrum of this human experience. That is why I am preordering, in addition to my complimentary contributor’s copy, the book Freeing Our Frozen Songs to place in the library at the Trauma Healing Project in Eugene, Oregon.

I invite you to preorder our collection via Kickstarter and consider sharing it with a loved one in your life, particularly one who has endured trauma of any kind, at any time. Or you might consider donating it to a community library. Or keeping the book just for yourself.

If that feels like too much of a commitment at this time, I completely understand. You instead might consider a “sneak peek” of our anthology on our website https://freeingourfrozensongs.com/. There, you can preview samples of our work, and get to know each contributor more intimately by reading our biographies and artist statements. Of course, you also might consider a simple share on social media or an email forward as a way to show our contributors and curator some love.

Regardless, know that your story is always worthy. Always. And autumn time is a wonderful reminder of the sweet release of letting go of that which no longer serves us. Like the leaves on the tree, we too reach our peak, change colors, and transform into something brand new, sometimes unrecognizable, but always with a thread of the familiar still hanging on.

Please be blessed on your journey, and I will too.

With thanks,

Mama Bird

If I Took My Grief Out to Lunch

Terah Van Dusen1 Comment

Dear Reader, Throughout the month of October I, along with a small group of other writers, wrote about loss in “Write Your Grief Out” with Anne and Maria Gudger. Here is one excerpt from that period, based on the prompt “If you took your grief out to lunch, what would you talk about?”

If I took my grief out to lunch, we’d talk about the way things used to be. How the other day I saw a small child sending crab pots off the dock into the ocean with her father. The way we used to do that before you became a vegetarian. Before you quit crabbing in the wintertime and raising rabbits for meat in our backyard. We’d talk about way before the tofu and carob phase, when you ate burgers and drank Budweiser. But that was never you, so I was glad I got to see your next phase too: your altars and spiritual books and how a real live guru came to visit us and stayed in our home and went on long walks with you in the woods.

If I took my grief out to lunch, we’d talk about the way things used to be. How half the pictures from when you were a boy show you at the top of some tree. Or expertly showing your hog for 4-H. Or snug in the middle of three sisters, volleying between tormenting them and being the soft shoulder they could cry on. How you had so much lived life before me, but it took you dying for me to really see that. The boy you’d been–wild as they come. The teenager you’d been–different, but popular and carefree. The man you’d become–a young, single father, your biggest challenge yet.

If I took my grief out to lunch, we’d go up river afterward. We’d blast Johnny Cash through the redwoods, roll down the windows, and stop for a drink of spring water gushing from Carter Falls. I’d take my grief inside the culvert under South Fork Road, where the runoff pours into the river in wintertime. We’d steady ourselves on the rocks, crouching just to watch the water run. Solely for the meditative purpose of it. We’d have no agenda. We’d have no to-do’s. We’d see a bald eagle and raise our hands to our chest in prayer. We’d skip rocks. We’d drive up further and park by Rock Creek. We’d travel up creek on bare feet. We might see a wild animal drinking from the stream; or a fairy ring of mushrooms, undisrupted. We’d awe.

If I took my grief out to lunch, we’d talk about the way things used to be. The time we rode elevators to the tops of the tallest buildings in San Francisco, just to look out the windows. Danced with other Hare Krishna devotees at Golden Gate Park, real ones who lived in the temples year round, not just for a few weeks in the summertime like we did. Venice Beach. Berkeley. Vancouver B.C. All the food and the flowers and the strangers. How we’d come back to Crescent City in September tanned, hair windblown and faces happy, just the two of us. No mom in sight and all the freer for it.

If I took my grief out to lunch we’d talk about the way things used to be–because it’s the best balm to the way things are now. Less colorful. Less natural. Less free. I don’t know many daughters who can claim that the best gift their parents gave them was freedom and exploration–just for the sake of it. Without agenda. But if I took my grief out to lunch, we’d talk about that.

With love,

Mama Bird

What Matters Most

Terah Van Dusen4 Comments

I shouldn’t still be thinking about the earrings I wore on the day of our wedding on Sunday, May 22, 2022, but I am. I’d wanted to convey that, despite Dad’s passing less than three weeks earlier, I was OK. It was all good and everything was fine.

But when I look back at the photos, I see me the day before the wedding, running frantically around the mall alone, bombarded with choices. There were plain gold hoops, bright neon feathers, faux diamond drop earrings, shaped like leaves, and the ones I got: showy gold hoops with crimson silk flowers. The earrings were distracting, and I hadn’t noticed that at the time.

What didn’t help is that until 72 hours before the wedding, I didn’t know which dress I was going to wear, my original choice never having arrived in the mail. It also didn’t help (or maybe it did) that, since Dad died, I decided that nothing superficial mattered anyway. It wasn’t what you wore, it’s what you said. It isn’t how you look, it’s how you see.

So on the one hand when I look at those photos, I think of those earrings as my “fuck it” earrings. The slap it all together and play-it-cool mood of that unique moment in my life. The wishing I could hide in plain sight. But the only statement those earrings seemed to be making was “whatever you do, don’t look at me.”

Do I wish, instead, I’d have selected the faux dangly earrings shaped like leaves? Yes, I can too clearly picture how they would have sparkled when catching the sunlight through the trees. But would I take it back and change it? No. Not really, because something else would have been off. As is in life in general. As is when you are having a wedding and you are having a funeral.

In this life, it really, truly isn’t about the perfect look and the photo-worthy setting. And I give myself grace that I knew that going into it, and I placed my priorities elsewhere when I didn’t give myself a lot of time to shop for the earrings, and I didn’t take along a friend. I didn’t really get that “bride moment”…the one that they were selling me. For me that fantasy involved a careful putting on of my high-heeled shoes (I would wind up wearing slip on leather wedges), a cheers with my bridal party, Lorde’s “Royals” blasting in the background, my “Cinderella” moment. What I got instead was a mad dash to the mall for last minute, unplanned accessories, and, in the bridal suite, our children running around underfoot, only the sound of shrieking and chatter in the background. What I got instead was real life, what actually matters, the people, the experiences, and yes, even the innocent fashion mistakes.

Now when I think back on our wedding day, I remember being thankful it didn’t rain. I remember being grateful nobody got hurt. I remember that “My Sweet Lord,” Dad’s song, came on the radio on the drive to the mall and it felt like it was playing just for me. I remember I cried. I remember I was fragile, deep down. I remember I couldn’t afford to crack. I remember writing and practicing my vows. I remember carefully putting out the ceramic dinner plates and silverware, buffing smudges out of the wine glasses in the dining room late into the night before our wedding.

I am trying to forget the sparkly earrings that got away. I want to let go of notion that tells me our wedding needed to be more perfect than it was. That I needed to be a better bride. That I had somehow let something slip. That I should have spent even more money. Then, maybe, things would have really been perfect. Maybe. When the only thing that honestly would have made that day better, is having Dad there for it.

Love and mysterious blessings,

Mama Bird

How to Grieve a Father (Before He’s Even Gone)

Terah Van Dusen5 Comments

After getting the news…

Go stand in the shower to cry, howl instead.

Wail to the heavens, his heavens, the heavens that he believes in enough for the both of you.

Squint your eyes at the crescent moon, the last moon Dad would ever know. Grapple with that for a minute.

Later, meticulously make note of the moon and its aspects: a waxing crescent moon in Gemini.

…Search for meaning. Always search for meaning.

Wonder aloud, tell him, “You were everything to me, Dad. And now you are everything.”

Light a candle, and then another candle, and then another candle. Burn sage and cedar wrapped in string. Sing the Maha Mantra over his dead/dying body. More wailing.

Then silence. Enough silence that someone says, “I think she’s in shock.”

Hold your hands in prayer. Pray for grace, pray for strength, but most of all, pray for his soul to be okay after falling off that ladder.

Notice his body swelling. His hands. His eyes. Listen when the doctors tell you it’s the machines that are keeping his body alive. Write all the dirty details in a notebook, as if that’s going to change anything. Prognosis: impossible.

Instruct them to keep keeping his body alive until all or most of his loved ones have come to see him, to say their goodbyes and their thank you’s.

Host them. Meet them in the waiting room. There are so many and they can only go in in twos.

Notice how his body is swelling. How at first he looked just like Dad, but now, not so much. Notice how he doesn’t open his eyes. Notice the artificial breath. Touch his hair.

Put your hands in prayer again.

Talk like Dad is in the room. Tell him, “So and so is here to see you, Dad.”

Surprise yourself by reciting the Lord’s Prayer verbatim during a too long silence.

After all the visitors, try to sleep next to Dad in a recliner that the hospital provided. Have trouble sleeping. Decline the offer for TV. Walk the halls of the hospital instead.

In the morning, instruct the doctor to unplug him. Play a favorite song. More wailing.

Let your grandpa hold you…something he’s never done before.

Weeks later, let your grandpa walk you down the isle at your wedding.

Ask the mortician to burn him with his tulsi mala beads on, wrapped around his wrist or placed around his neck.

Liken him to Christ in his obituary.

Don’t wash Dad’s laundry, because that means he’ll really be gone.

Place a portrait of him as a baby at your dining room table. His cherub-like smile greeting you every morning.

Place his adult portrait on your dresser, making eye contact every time you pass it.

Decide you don’t need Dad in your bedroom, on your dresser, looking over you. Place the portrait in the common room instead–a reminder to all who enter, “Father Gone But Not Forgotten.”

Search for rainbows. Stitch a quilt of silver linings.

Study Dad’s birth and death dates for meaning: 11/11/62 – 5/5/22

Find none because your mind is too blurry.

Place the jelly in the cupboard and the peanut butter in the fridge.

Finally wash Dad’s laundry, twice to get rid of the ICU smell. But refuse to put the clothes away. Then it’ll really, really mean that Dad’s gone.

Gone. Meditate on the origin of the word. It’s from the Old English “gan” meaning to depart or go away.

Dearly departed. Indeed.

Take a month to go pick up the cremains, which they present to you in a box inside a gift bag.

Tell yourself you’re going to buy little ceramic jars for the family. Then don’t.

Smoke too much pot. It was your and Dad’s “thing.” That and swimming or soaking.

Tell yourself you’re going to take yourself to the water every opportunity you get. Then don’t.

Tell yourself you’re going to send a card to the nurse staff at Sutter Coast Hospital. Then don’t.

Tell yourself you’re going to try not to be so hard on yourself for once. Then don’t.

Have breakfast with his baby picture everyday. Granola and that gummy smile.

Tap into that grief place through music. Play all the emotional ones. Unknown Legend. Eureka. Ripple.

Take a walk in the woods, it’s what he would have wanted.

My Sweet Lord

Terah Van Dusen18 Comments

I am not a destiny person. Or I wasn’t until now anyway. I’m still wary of signing off on that whole concept. But I dare you not to think of God or the afterlife, when staring at a body you once knew, loved, even relied on, hooked up to a life support machine. Questions of what the soul is, where the soul is, and where that soul will end up are likely to swirl around in your consciousness for weeks, if not forever, if you are like me.

So that is where I am now. As I write this, it is seven days after Dad’s passing. I am reflecting on how in those moments of great challenge with Dad, in those hours that I laid by his bedside in the hospital, I surprised myself by curling up in the presence of Something Greater. It didn’t feel good to pray and to surrender—nothing felt good at that time—but it felt completely necessary. The experience with Dad made me question my own faith, or what little there was left of it. This is all to say, you don’t need spirituality…until you do. And you will.

I usually cringe at statements like “It was meant to happen” or “It was all part of God’s plan.” Now there is a small fissure in the wall of my beliefs, where the narrowest slip of light can come in. I didn’t become a believer overnight. Or rather over those 36 hours between Dad’s accident (a fall from a ladder) and when we took him off life support. But my defenses did soften. Where else was there to turn, but to some idea of God? To some idea of an afterlife? I couldn’t just turn on the television and forget about it all, though they did, perplexingly, have a TV in the ICU.

How could all of this, I questioned, from work to play and everything else in-between be orchestrated? It had all been said by others before but, if it were all orchestrated, why would innocent people be imprisoned and tortured, people who love with all they have become broken hearted, and children be born, and die, on the streets? Why is there no justice on this earth?

If there was such a thing as heaven, I hoped there was justice there. The truth is, there is no conflict in heaven. So there needs to be no justice.

According to many, the answer to why there is so much pain and there is so much suffering is that the soul has a need for spiritual evolution. That each has their own lessons to learn in this life, on this earth. Without conflict, our spiritual selves cannot grow or evolve. In the days after Dad’s passing, people started saying things like, “His work here was done.”

Dad used to talk a lot about religion and spirituality. And now that he’s not physically here, I feel I owe him the respect of listening, of leaning into his beliefs, of opening my heart and mind to what he’d been saying all along. His teachings have never been more relevant. In the moments by his bedside, I experienced more than one “ah ha.”

The best I can do for Dad now is to breathe more life into those wisdoms and teachings that he’d had. In his obit, which I wrote, I liken him to Christ. It’s a bold statement, I know. But some people don’t realize the well of compassion that Dad carried within him. Just one example, at the time of his death there was, and still is, a man living on Dad’s property. When we approached him and asked where they’d met, the man said he met Dad at the Mission. He’d just been released from prison, and Dad offered him a place to stay. As a child, there was always one person, usually a convicted felon, living on our land. These are people who had been shunned from society, with no place else on earth to go. And Dad was there for them, as hard as that was for me at times.

“Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him.” Proverbs 14:31

I didn’t know that scripture, I don’t know any scriptures, really, but thinking about Dad’s ways, I did a quick Google search. It turns out there are a shit ton of scriptures just like that one.

When the doctor came into the room—Dr. Christie—he asked me, with complete respect, why I had laid a hindi blanket across Dad’s body. I fingered the white cloth with the red Sanskrit lettering and depictions of Krishna and Rhada.

“Dad is a Hare Krishna…and a Christian, and a Buddhist,” I told Dr. Christie.  

He took a sidelong glance at the Bible I’d brought and placed on the table next to Dad’s breathing machine. He worshipped any God that was in front of him, I thought. But I can’t remember if I told Dr. Christie that or not.

A few days later, I was reading a book “Embraced by the Light” by Betty J. Eadie and came across this:

“I wanted to know why there were so many churches in the world. Why didn’t God give us one church, one religion? The answer came to me with the purest of understanding. Each of us is at a different level of spiritual development and understanding. Each person is prepared for a different level of spiritual knowledge. All religions on earth are necessary because there are people who need what they teach.”

It turns out that that book “Embraced by the Light” would help me access my spirituality through a side door: near death experiences or NDEs. I couldn’t come to that spiritual place head on, through the Bible or the Baghavad-Gita. I don’t jive, and never have, with religious stories that read like fiction or with timelines that seem to counter science.

But I could get behind near death experiences themselves, I mean, Dad and I had both had one. His, we all believe, was what made him the way he was. But more on that later. I couldn’t possibly tell this entire story in one sitting. In my journal, where I have been laying down all the letters and words that have been helping me come to some place of understanding at this unimaginable crossroad in my life, my writing now shifts from addressing you, the audience, to addressing Dad himself. This change in style makes it difficult for me to continue the story and round it out in a nice, easy way, so I will share the next segment of what I have written in my journal, before closing this chapter and picking the story up in a different piece. If anything is to render me speechless, or wordless, it is Dad’s passing. So be it. The fact that I cannot finish this essay is a testament to my grief.

My next paragraph is, “I thought of how, since you were a boy, you’d had one foot in this world and one foot in another. You didn’t remember ‘what happened’ when you were in a month-long coma, or what happened to your soul in those moments that you floated lifeless on top of the water, having drowned, but it was clear that you’d met God.”

This is all to say that you don’t need spirituality…until you do. And you will. And also this: some things you just can’t write, or reason, your way out of.

Love and mysterious blessings,

Mama Bird

A Simple Potluck Dinner

Terah Van Dusen3 Comments

Last Saturday we piled into the minivan and headed, for the first time since moving here more than five years ago, to a locally infamous community potluck at a place called Big Bear Camp. The potluck happens monthly and follows a different theme. I imagined themes like comfort food and Asian food, but wasn’t exactly sure. We’d long wanted to go to the potlucks but missed the opportunity during Autumn’s newborn phase, and then the pandemic happened, and it wasn’t until recently that the owners of Big Bear Camp, an engaging couple of retirement age, called us on the telephone. They addressed us as the “chicken people” and invited us to their monthly community potluck, which had just started up again.

We’d passed their sign before marking Big Bear Camp on the long, winding and wooded Nelson Mountain Road back when we used to drive it regularly to visit our good friends in Deadwood. The road connects our small town, Walton, with another small town, Deadwood. Deadwood was always a decidedly cooler place than Walton, but if anything were to change my mind about that, it was sure to be our experience at Big Bear Camp.

Time stands still in some places. Takilma, Oregon. Deadwood. And even, I would learn, at Big Bear Camp–located 33 miles outside of Eugene. I am certain that a million places like this exist across our country. They’re the places that don’t show up on glossy brochures. They’re places where GPS always gets it wrong. And where you are more likely to see a person walking in bare feet, with flowers in their hair, a beer in their hand, and their face toward the sun, rather than looking down at their watch, or phone; or rushing in and out of big box stores, and chasing the next “thing” at breakneck speed. These places are a step outside, even, your quintessential small towns–your Tombstone, Arizona’s; your Virginia City, Montana’s. It’s a place for locals where nothing, and I mean nothing, is being sold. Just bartered.

I immediately felt at home when we, after arriving late, were welcomed into the wide circle of what must have been over forty five people, who were introduced as our neighbors. In that moment I honestly felt more connected than I have in years.

After introductions, people made their way to the lodge for a potluck feast served on the wraparound porch outside. Lively discussions about solar energy, sustainable food production, and building homes using reclaimed local timber ensued.

“There’s more food inside,” a pretty elderly woman dressed in a blue wool coat told us. She sported coral pink lip gloss and I was immediately drawn to her, and inspired by her style. I almost regretted wearing my fresh-of-the-farm outfit: black from head-to-toe. Next time, I told myself, I’d wear some color. I wanted to talk to her, but before I could say a word she’d fluttered away.

It was eye-opening to see so many other likeminded and friendly people, right there in our backyard. I’d almost come to believe to some extent that these kind of people only existed in my phone. What a mistake that had been, and what a casualty of the isolated, pandemic-era.

After the feast, which was as lively as always for Steve and I–balancing our paper plates with metal forks and grabby, wobbly, three-year-old–the host pointed us to the “library” on the lodge’s second floor. We rounded the spiral staircase to a comfortable landing place for any parent and child. Energized as she was, I couldn’t get Autumn to focus on a single children’s book. That was until a little girl close to her age–almost three years her senior–wandered up. Autumn was content to have the little girl read to her when she offered, and the two happily played together for the rest of our visit.

For sometime, I sat in a chair in the corner of the library, just catching my metaphorical breath. Not catching my breath from socializing or parenting, things you might think of when I say that. But catching my breath from the fast paced and often artificial world outside the walls of Big Bear Camp and other places like it. Looking down from the loft library at all the people sitting face-to-face, eating pie under the glow of solar light, with not a phone or screen in sight; I felt both sad and happy. Sad because something as ordinary as sitting face-to-face, and really giving someone your attention was somehow a novelty now. And happy because I felt warm and fuzzy just witnessing and being a part of it all. This recently forgotten ritual: a simple potluck dinner.

I wanted to stay forever off grid, where the norms were flipped on their heads and where the something missing was at the heart of all the magic. When devoid of technology, we only have each other to connect with.

Of course I didn’t say any of this to anyone. And when one of the hosts appeared in the library on multiple occasions, I noticed that while he was speaking to me, he was also grabbing books. He grabbed one book off the arm of a chair. Another off a shelf. He did this very nonchalantly, as if I wouldn’t notice. Of course, I did notice. I noticed one was titled “Women of the Woods,” or something like that. I knew he was going downstairs to pass the novel off to one person or another, and naturally that made me happy. I liked to imagine how far back these traditions went, how long he and his neighbor had been trading paperback westerns. Two individuals, about my age, popped their heads into the library. Both said they’d been coming to Big Bear Camp since they were kids, that their parents read to them in the library I was sitting in. I smiled thinking of my own upbringing off grid, and how deep an impact my community had left on me, too. And how I desperately wanted that for my daughter.

This is all to say that the potluck was a reminder that there are still one million ways to live a life. And that time stands still, even today, in some places. Perhaps with this new awareness, we too can create a more intentional living space, built on a foundation of art, knowledge and community. And food. And although we did puncture a tire on the drive home, we will definitely be going back to Big Bear Camp’s next monthly potluck. And I’ll be sure to wear my colors.

Love,

Mama Bird

Something Was Missing. It Wasn’t Social Media…Was it?

Terah Van Dusen5 Comments

A few months ago, I deactivated my social media accounts. I posted an index card on my bulletin board that read, “No Social Media. No Corporations. No Amazon. More creativity & blogging” next to a poster I clipped out of a magazine that reads “Keep Calm & Save Money” in bold red lettering.

Three clear thumb tacks lined up neatly below the messages—reinforcing one thing that was resounding through my mind and soul lately: minimalism.

Minimalism: a style or technique, that can be applied to a lifestyle, characterized by extreme sparseness and simplicity.

Deactivating my social media accounts was my way of extending the concept of minimalism even further. Everything felt so cluttered.

<< >>

It started out okay, as I explained in this blog post from September. Gone were the feelings of embarrassment I’d felt during those rare but inevitable moments of “oversharing.” Gone were the unnecessary hours spent scrolling, or “managing” my various accounts—I have two personal accounts, and three business ones. Gone was the feeling that I needed to “capture” everything: a good meal, Autumn collecting eggs from the chicken coop, an innocent walk to the creek.

All the time the world offered came tumbling back in, and I began to experience more productivity at work, and creatively too. Things were happening. Actually happening. I became a more productive team member at work, a more present mother, and more conscious partner to my fiancé. I even took the final steps toward completing a huge creative project.

The days turned into weeks turned into months. During this time, I posted several times on my blog—a significant increase from previous months (years, really). But I could tell that my creative social network had gotten really, really small.

There was my small handful of loyal readers who reached out to me via text or by responding directly to my posts. I am grateful for these folks with a capital G, but I began to wonder if I could get through the rest of the pandemic, and election year, with my “capsule” of friends. I was starting to feel a little lonely.

Late one night, after a productive day of freelancing from home, I found myself borderline distraught. I lay in our bed, without the glow of my cell phone, and I said dramatically into the dark room, “I just feel like something is missing.”

In the silence that followed my—for lack of a better term—wail, I thought of my vow against social media…it wasn’t that, was it?

Was it?!?

<< >>

Not jumping to conclusions, I continued to wake, live and sleep every day without the companionship of social media. A few people reached out, but where were my other 538 friends? I realized, as I’m sure we all have, the predicament these social platforms present: they are an instant doorway to our families, and some relationships that are quite important to us. So why would we want to give up that? Honestly, especially now in a pandemic, how else are we going to get to know our new cousin’s baby, Jaxon? Or even remember his name? It’s all there, on Facebook. We understand that the heart emoji doesn’t convey all we want to say, but it does convey something.

In addition to working more intentionally—both personally and professionally—I toyed with the idea of letter-writing. I wrote a letter to Elizabeth, my longtime pen pal who resides in the Yosemite Valley. She wrote me back, as did our mutual friend, David. But David’s letter was so long and rich, I wondered how my response could even compare, or come close to being as meaningful as his letter had been, as he described the terror of wildfires looming near his home on Caves Highway this summer. If social media was intimidating, trying exchanging letters with intellectuals. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this, either. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t exchange letters with as many people as I loved. (I love a lot of people!)

I don’t remember the exact day I reinstalled the apps on my phone. Only the approximate number of people who interacted with the photo I posted. Warily, I “liked” all of their responses. But where were these folks when I sat at home for four months? Autumn and I had both celebrated our birthdays—her 2nd, my 35th. Was it me who’d left them or they who’d left me? In this day and age, I’m honestly not sure.

In the meantime, I began to value my work relationships more, and my relationships with my family members who don’t use social media, my blog readers, and my neighbors began to deepen—it was as if I could suddenly see that they’d needed attention, too.

I am on social media now, and I do feel more connected to those that I’d lost touch with. I at least like knowing that such-and-such person is there if I need them, even if we’re not interacting every day.

But friendship can’t survive solely that way, and neither can a creative or professional dream. The inspiration—the ideas and conversations and plans—they need to lead somewhere. I’ve learned that “breaking the spell,” ie taking a break, is the perfect antidote for that. So just one question remains: can I take what I’ve learned and apply it? Can I use social media as a tool, to share my art and give and receive love from my friends, while still setting a healthy boundary with these websites and apps? It is hard to know for sure, but I have hope. Hope that I can either find the balance, or at least recognize when my “real” life needs more attention.

Love,

Mama Bird