Have Faith in the Story

"Stories told to oneself or others could transform the world."

                                        winter sunset • Santa Fe, New Mexico

“Sofie knew and taught me that everyone had some story, every house held a life that could be penetrated and known, if one took the trouble. Stories told to oneself or others could transform the world. Waiting for others to tell their stories, even helping them to do so, meant no one could be regarded as completely dull, no place people lived in was without some hope of redemption, achieved by paying attention.”

- anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, about her grandmother

February 24, 2024 / Full Moon

I promise I won’t write about writing each full moon. But many of you have been so supportive of my journey to step into writing these past few months, and so I wanted to give a little update on how it’s going. Since last month’s Leap of Faith, I’ve been immersed in a daily writing process. What a mirror it’s been to see myself, my family, and the world in new ways.

As I’ve shared, the intention with this time has been to work on a piece about the transformation of my relationship with my elderly parents, who died in 2021 of COVID — and weaving into that, the story of a beloved friend who shepherded me through my mom and dad’s dying process, only to receive her own cancer diagnosis just a few weeks after my mom’s death.

Originally I imagined this would be a long-form essay about that year of life (Ann Patchett’s “These Precious Days” has been a great inspiration). Much to my surprise, I now seem to be writing a memoir. Here are a few discoveries from this past month –

• I made a commitment first to the writing process, without attachment to making this into a particular kind of story or that it would one day be published. A couple of months ago I had a wonderful conversation with Hisae Matsuda who edited my first book, Work That Matters, and who is now the publisher at Parallax Press. She reminded me that Parallax is my publishing home. I could write the kind of mindfulness-oriented book that might be of interest for publication there – but I don’t want to have to fit the writing into that box if it’s not naturally going there. I’m trying to let the story tell me what it wants to be, not the other way around.

• It feels terribly pretentious to say “I’m writing a memoir.” That’s not a judgment on anyone else who has written one. It’s just that I’ve always been more comfortable lifting up other people’s stories and voices than having my own in the spotlight and, frankly, I never thought of my own life story was all that interesting. The insight that this is probably a memoir first came from a conversation with a writer friend earlier in the month, and now it’s coming from understanding that in order to do this story justice, I need to follow one dot to the next to the next and find where they connect. As I write I realize the reader won’t be able to understand one part without including another part, and I see that the story is so much richer with more depth of field. This web of stories and memories is falling naturally into a memoir format, no matter how uncomfortable that makes me. Or how much longer this will take. Oh well!

• There are glimpses of the formation of “whiteness” in my family history, especially on my mom’s side. I didn’t have an expectation for that to come up, but it’s embedded in the history of my mom’s family and where they came from. Her parents emigrated from what is now the Eastern European country of Slovenia back in the 1910s and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. In doing some research on the Catholic parish that her family belonged to, I found this interesting piece of history on the church’s website:

“The road to find a permanent place of worship was a difficult one for early Slovenian settlers. A group of immigrants from Slovenia, an Alpine nation once part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, settled in the village of Collinwood, Ohio. They sought work in skilled trades, raised families and held true to their Catholic faith, but were outcast by other nationalities at the only Catholic church in the area, St. Joseph Church. They were sometimes restricted to the last pews in the church to worship and called ‘Greenhorns’ or ‘Greiners’ by people of other ethnic descents.”

What a fascinating example that back in those days, the definition of who was “white,” who was “American,” was very much in contention, with certain European ethnicities ranked far above others. Along with other immigrant families, my maternal grandfather and grandmother had to go through a long and often painful process of assimilation to have access to privileges that other ethnicities had obtained (it’s a different story on my dad’s side of the family, of German ethnicity). Of course Black and Native families were completely left out in that process, and to a large degree still are. I’m also reading the book Caste right now (by Isabel Wilkerson), an incredible exposition of this system of hierarchy that has and continues to be the source of so much harm.

Waves of doubt sometimes lap up on my creative shores in this process. Who am I to write this? Can I even do this? That phrase I shared in my January message continues to pop up now and then: “Feeling wholly inadequate to the task ahead of me, nonetheless I venture forward.” At the same time another voice is growing stronger: Have faith in the story. Have faith that you are the one to tell it. Have faith that it may mean something to someone else, so it’s worth being told.

Perhaps the biggest gift from this past month is feeling what it’s like to honor my own gift as a writer, as an artist. For most of my life I have not trusted that aspect of me to fully take its place in the world. There have been many reasons for this, ranging from the ridiculous to the heartbreaking to the practical. But I know that any time we sidestep who we truly are and what we’re here to offer, our personal world goes out of order and the larger world is missing a piece of the puzzle. I talk about that a lot in Work That Matters and when I teach workshops on right livelihood – Core Intention is a critical piece of this. Now I’m on my own journey to fully inhabit mine, and it’s invigorating.

As I feel ready, I may share segments of what I’m drafting for this memoir here on my Substack. Thank you for following the journey!

acknowledgments…

• I want to give a big nod to

  Summer Brennan
  and her course, A Year of Writing Dangerously, which is providing me a structure and support for this process. Summer is an amazing writer and a gifted teacher; if you ever have a chance to take her Essay Camp or other offerings, do it.

• I also want to thank Upaya Zen Center for giving me a beautiful place to write for a week during this month; their Santa Fe campus is extraordinary.

• Finally I send so much gratitude to each of you who have signed up for a paid Substack subscription or made a donation. This has allowed me to take the time and space to get more intimate with this story and to write — a lot. I’ve already burned through two pens : ) And there’s much more to come!

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