A House of My Own Making

Photo credit: Mark Wagner

There I was weeping, 10 minutes before my early morning Wild Writing Family call where 75 writers were waiting for me. Weeping because the electricity and the lights in the house had just gone off, weeping because the house was pitch dark inside and outside in the yard too. My first thought was where’s Mark? Where is Mark? I thought without thinking, and a wave of sadness washed through me.

10 minutes before class and I was a kind of sad I’m not used to. Tears I’m not used to, a swollen, choked up feeling that couldn’t be swallowed away, not like all the other times I’ve been sad when I’d clear my throat and shake it away because I didn’t have time, because I wasn’t ready, because it was inconvenient and because I was busy.

Ten minutes before class and I was a new kind of sad, plus I still didn’t have a “lesson” for my Wild Writing students. I still didn’t have one of those lovely little stories I like to share with them before we get to the writing; the quote I’d found, the reading I’d come across, the reminder to soften their belly and to lay down all their striving and to just show up – show up the way Leonard Cohen says to show up when he reminds us what we’re all hungry for, the natural man, he says, the natural woman.

I was sad because my ex husband of ten years, my brother, the man I have known for 37-years and who I share a house with half the year, was making big changes in his life, and which included leaving California and moving full time to New Mexico. His move had to do with art, it had to do with love, it had to do with those explosively bright white clouds that descend on the valley nearly every afternoon near his home. It had to do with how much he loves that land and how he feels entirely like himself there.

A week before when he told me the news he prefaced it by saying, “You might not be happy with what I’m about to tell you,” so I listened as he explained, and I nodded and I said, that sounds right. And I hope I said I’m happy for you, because I mean to be generous like that. It took me days to let the news settle into me, and when it did, it hit me surprisingly hard.

I didn’t realize how deeply I felt connected to Mark. It’s more than our two children, Ruby and Zoe, or our 24-year marriage or the home we built, the community we made here in Northern California. More than how handy he is when he’s here; clearing gutters, and scheming how to get under the deck to shoo away the family of raccoons living there – though I am grateful for all of those things too.

Our connection is more than all that. It’s old, probably karmic. It’s not about the kids or the house – it’s something more invisible, hard to name. When you’ve spent more than half your life with someone, something gets woven between you. And after all the work we’ve done to move from marriage into deep friendship, that thread feels even more sacred. It isn’t romantic, and it isn’t obligation – it’s something quieter, a kind of soul-familiarity that is its own kind of love, harder to name, harder to see.

I got on that Zoom call and I scanned the room, page after page, and I saw so many people who have come to that every other Monday call over the last five years, so many people I have come to call friends, some I’ve met in person, some I only know online, but who I feel close to. There was Sedra, and B.J. and Dayna, Donna, Nancy, Annalyn, Diana and Bohor, and dozens more people who didn’t have to be there, but who chose to come to the call to do the deep work of Wild Writing together. And in that moment I realized I was at home in a house of my own making, and that this space we call class wasn’t just a place for others, but a place for me too. A place I had built so I could do my work, the work of unfolding and healing.

And so I did the thing I’d been asking them to do for years, which was to take a breath, to relax and trust what was moving through me, which was sadness – and I began to cry right there on the call.

So much of the time I think I need to teach from whatever I think my strength is. But maybe I can be courageous enough to teach from my cracks – from the places I am still tender, still human, still learning how to let go of everything I want to hold on to.

The lights went out. And there in the dark, I could finally see.