Carrie Link

A DIFFERENT HOLY TRINITY


I bump out of bed, eye mask off, ear plugs out, slippers on, and nearly crawl to the coffee maker. I've spent the night napping again. Every three hours, like an infant, I'm up and needing to eat and be entertained. Menopause is reducing me to my most needy self, in all ways imaginable.

In the time I've submitted my manuscript and waited for others to tell me what to do with it, I've watched as my body takes on the shape and symptoms of a pregnant woman. Breasts tender and swollen, stomach distended, hormones off kilter.

Menopause?

Pregnancy?

Infancy?

A holy trinity?

A quote from the movie, "The Secret" falls into my mind, "When the voice on the inside is louder than the voices on the outside, you will have mastered your life."

My inside voice says, "No more waiting for 'others.' No more putting the onus on anyone but you. YOU know what to write and how to write it. Stop procrastinating, projecting and promising yourself to others. Get your butt in the chair and let those fingers start to fly."

* * * * *

A blogger friend, someone I've never actually met, Lo sends me information on a new book and author I must check out. The author is coming to Portland and I am needing to attend.

I do. I watch and listen to a woman I know nothing about. A woman with not one single thing in common with me other than our gender.

I go home, start to read her book, her memoir, and cannot put it down. Her story is enthralling, but her WRITING, oh, my God. It is the link, the missing one, to what I've been waiting for all these months and years. Suddenly I "get it." I GET what all the teachers and writers have been trying to tell me about my own writing. They've been extraordinarily helpful, but they were virtual lessons on how to fish. Felicia Sullivan's book handed me a pole and said, "Here. Like this."

So inspired after finishing her book I moved straight to the keyboard from the reading chair, and opened a brand new document on my computer. Here's what came out:

CHAPTER 1

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”
Federico Fellini
(1920 – 1993)

I bend at the knees, “Let your legs do the work,” my mother’s voice plays in my ear, “save your back!” Feet in her old sandals, hands in her forgotten gloves, pushing her old, what used to be green, wheelbarrow around her land, I stop the bending, teetering on the balls of my feet, hot, July sun straight above, I let go of the handles of the wheelbarrow. I fall backwards, gently, letting the soft, dry land catch me.
The journey from crouch to stand seems infinite. It’s beyond what I have the energy to do. And so I don’t. I let myself fall. Simply let gravity take over, where my strength has left off.
Eyes at the sky with my hand making shade, I stop. Just like that. I don’t push the wheelbarrow. I don’t lift the rocks. I don’t finish what I started. I stop.
I lie on my back, knees bent, legs splayed to make a W, and I listen. It’s so quiet here. So quiet I hear the birds, the wind, a dog barking far away, the air conditioner humming from inside the house. I’ve never wanted to stop before, never wanted to hear the quiet, make room for what it is trying to say, but I can’t push it back for one more minute. The weight of the quiet is stronger than my will to silence it.
What I was always afraid of happening if I stopped; begins to happen. Tears slip under the barge, first one, then several, evaporating quickly on my cheeks. When they start to fall faster than the sun can dry them, I grab the bottom of my dirty t-shirt and dab them away.
The words on my t-shirt say “Joyful Heart,” but the shirt is a liar and so am I. My heart is not full of joy. My heart is not full at all. My heart is a stranger to itself, empty, void. My head, that is what is full, full of noise and confusion and anger and lies. Grit in my ears, full of messages I am tired of recycling through on a continuous loop. A loop that threatens to clutch at my throat and choke the life right out of it.
When my tears and snot, sweat and soreness make it necessary to get up and address their needs, I do. I rise from my spot on the ground, look over at the house on my left, the mountains on my right, sun up above and the impression my body has left below. I’ve left impressions everywhere I’ve been in this lifetime.
I back the wheelbarrow over the dented earth, scribbling the impression away. Without a trace.

(You'll have to buy the book to get the rest of this type of brilliance.)

Thank you teachers known and unknown.

Thank you voices within and without.

Thank you, no accidents.

Felicia Sullivan