“The stories we tell shape how we experience everything.”
– Gareth Higgins, How Not To Be Afraid
Two years ago I stood outside, crying in front of the mountains. As I stared out to the horizon, a small voice inside said, “I’m going to need to figure out what story I tell myself about this.”
This. My mom’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Drowning in stress from opening a (short-lived) retail farm store. Finally pivoting away from the farm business, which meant shifting nearly every way I’d related to my home, my husband, and my community for the past 10 years.
For two weeks, I cried nearly non-stop.
Even then, in the midst of an internal storm, I knew the story I told myself about this mattered.
I’m still figuring out that story. Learning how to write it gently. Finding out what parts require ferocity.
Stepping forward as time beats on and brings bigger storms – historic floods and tropical storms that reach all the way north to New England. Hurricanes that ravage the South. Fires that scorch the west.
How do we hold it all? These personal losses and public tragedies.
How do we remember to exhale?
We do it together.
Yes, there are times when I need to retreat alone. But after a fallow season, it’s friendship and community and song that are reminding me how to breathe deep and feel it all.
Two weeks ago I joined Shire Choir, a six-week community singing workshop led by Heidi Wilson.
On the first night, she taught us the song “Sing Our Way Back To Hope,” by Sarina Partridge:
Oh the red sun rises On a world on fire But it also rises, on a holy choir Singing through the dark times Through the ash and smoke Weave the grief into the song And sing our way back to hope
There’s something about singing in a circle of people, chests vibrating as notes lift, that makes all we hold a little bit lighter.
The grief is still there, but stitched to a song it becomes more bearable. Transformation becomes possible.
Stories do that, too.
How we tell stories, what we focus on and lift up, shapes possibilities. Here, right now, as we face floods that carve away roads and illnesses that erode memory, we still get to choose what story we tell. There is deep grief, yes. There is immense loss.
“Some things will keep breaking,” Gareth Higgins writes, “yet amid their wreckage, healing will accelerate. How much we experience of the healing will depend on the story we tell…”
I’m telling a story of love.
A story of people coming together, of people listening, and opening to gentler ways of living. A story that can be sung across valleys and up over the horizon. A story where loss is turned over like compost and I plant seeds in the nourishing soil as one season opens to the next.
Something happens when you start telling a new story.
Chapters open up that you didn’t expect. In just over a week, I’m going to Ireland for a story retreat led by Gareth Higgins. Two years ago, crying at the mountains, I couldn’t have imagined the space or ability to leave my family for 10 days and do something like this for myself.
There’s still so much I feel uncertain about, but the last two years have taught me that I’m allowed to start again. So I’m singing. I’m writing poetry. I’m sharing it with you.
And you? What stories are you turning over? What possibilities are you opening up?
Maybe you’re at the end of one, unsure of how to put it into words. This poem is for those times, and is part of my chapbook Lineage of Heartbeats:
Proof Enough I still don’t know what happened My eyes never saw it coming though like those stories of animals who flee to the highlands before a monsoon hits – Elephants trumpeting birds flying, snakes winding to treetops – My body knew Those incredible waves churning inside as water replaced words as tears seeped through closed lids as I gulped every breath not knowing what I would lose on the exhale Sometimes letting go is a hurricane Who am I now? Do elephants ask this as they descend back to the lowlands as the waters recede who am I? in this remade landscape Or is what remains enough – this body my body bones and flesh, proof enough that I made it through the storm
May you sing. And when you can’t sing, may you feel held by the land and songs around you.
My Poetry Pop-Up Shop closes today (Saturday, October 5). Get a copy of Lineage of Heartbeats.