I have tried to start this blog for an embarrassingly long time. This attempt will most likely wither on the vine like all the others. While this is not a terribly auspicious beginning I press on in spite of myself.

For someone who can’t seem to stop writing, and can’t seem to do anything with it, the guilt adds up over the years along with binders and file folders. I like hard copy. Self reproach deepens when more than some of the very few people who have had a chance to read a piece say, for example, “Your writing needs to have a wider audience.” Predictably, a milky fog rolls in turning my brain into something like cottage cheese. I enter a temporary fugue state. 

Being untethered to my ordinary life for even a short time is disconcerting. A voice speaks from the grave, the finger waggling in my face, “Who do you think you are little girl. You have to work hard and earn your way. Life will take you down a peg, you wait and see. Who do you think you are?“ 

Exactly what all those words meant evaded the young little person I was, but somehow a message came through. I was nobody. I had to pay. To this day I carry this persistent directive deep inside as if written in permanent marker on the core of my being. I must be grateful for every breath I take. I must always look to and care for the needs of others. I must share whatever I have to offer to the world of humankind …

I have developed a way to return from this angst when even a kindly meant appreciation reignites ghostly demons skilled at applying pressure in just the right place to make sure I’m paying my debt. The Cure.

The Cure is simply working hard, usually outside on my small farm. The work routinely involves dirt, and all manner of fecal matter with a little something extra thrown in for variety. Pruning a large thorny raspberry patch in a cold February drizzle was today’s little extra. Hands red and frozen, a top-notch self-inflicted punishment for the guilt ridden. I take The Cure to the next level with those cold-to-the-bone hands and clean the chicken coop then haul the refuse up the hillside to the compost pile while facing into a nasty NE wind. I ask, can I cook or can I cook?

Now I’m too tired to feel the entire weight of responsibility to others that all that hard physical labor expelled. Being mostly relieved of the pressure I take my dog for a walk in our little woods. Good medicine for any ailment. This always turns into her taking me for a walk. She is an unruly big dog who retains a highly independent nature. She knows what she’s about and looks into my eyes to be sure I understand. Zoe is strong both in body and mind, a wild thing who unabashedly chooses to curl up next to me on the couch laying her head on the softest of pillows. We stop in the woods where I routinely sit on a rough log bench and run my hands through her furry coat and smell the top of her head. A few remnants of today’s guilt wash away in the inhalation of her exquisite dogness. 

My dog is part of the untamed world that refuses to be yoked to social norms. The world of trees, teeth, grasses, roots, claws, feathers, and fur. I run to the natural world to right myself when societal expectations, all the shoulds, threaten the quiet inside me. Surrounded by the ordered chaos of this high desert environment I come close to eliminating the nagging pangs of my inherited indebtedness for the right to take up space on this planet. The debt that can only be repaid by working hard and giving back. 

A friend posited that perhaps with a little shift in thinking I could look at the joy ‘it’ could bring to a wider audience, (‘it’ referring to a children’s book I’ve written, yes, a complete book in a binder on a shelf) I think I’d need Archimedes lever for that shift, but hey, I’m here, revealing my ragged soul.

The mixed bag of obligation entangled with a genuine love of gifting persists. It’s like one of those almost invisible spiny raspberry hairs that penetrate my garden gloves and pierce the tender flesh on one of my fingertips. The kind that’s so paradoxically fragile that you can’t get it out with a tweezer yet somehow it gets through all my defenses, pinching at every touch to remind me that yes, it’s still there.