I Carry the Heart of a Mother

After dreaming of leaving Earth, I suddenly felt a deep appreciation for living on it. Such is the power of a transformative dream. I found myself wanting to share so many things with my daughter—reflections on what I hold dear and what I've come to understand about the often incomprehensible, somehow miraculous human experience.

I wrote to my child before she was born:

You are getting bigger and bigger. The moment closer and closer. I hope you have a life of unlimited creativity, using the power of your imagination to build the world as you see it. Otherwise, the limits of others will paralyze. As long as you see how brilliant your life can be, their dull rendition is theirs alone.

I found this in an old journal. Writing in a journal has always helped me find myself and it's the practice that has shaped me the most. It's part of the work of creating a life. If we don't take the time to understand who we are, how can we know what our life should look like? What well will we draw from?

It's that same deep well, by the way, that grounds and guides us in our ever-changing, always-moving modern world. It lets us be still.

There are so many opinions about motherhood and art, many of which I've always found absurd. They assume that all women are cut from the same cloth—that our desires, temperaments, aspirations and ambitions, should somehow be identical.

In my case, motherhood fueled my creativity. It enabled me to focus, to stop second-guessing myself. Without the luxury of time, I learned to trust my intuition more. My work became looser, more spontaneous—something I had always tried to achieve but never quite grasped. I lightened up.

Other female artists—Ruth Asawa, Fay Jones, Maira Kalman—all sculpted, drew, wrote and painted with their young children beside them, amplifying their creativity. They are inspiration, role models and a road map in this unique landscape of motherhood.

They offer a glimpse of the creative freedom to be found when we embrace the world of a child. The uninhibited energy, where nothing is off-limits, nothing is too precious, nothing is good or bad.

I might never have become the artist and writer I am today, if I hadn't become a mother.

When my daughter was young, our family had a nightly ritual. Each night before bed, she would think of something she was grateful for. It could be anything, and she could say the same thing every night, which she often did.

There were the ones you'd expect—Thank you for a great first week of kindergarten, Thank you for the greatest ever mom and dad, Thank you for the greatest big big ice cream sundae…

And then there were some that took my breath away—

Thank you for not letting me have a sad heart Thank you for letting me come into the world Thank you for letting me be in this world

I wrote her words into little books, which I still keep, tucked in the drawer of my bedside table—a treasured reminder of what's truly important.

Gratitude can be harder to hold onto once childhood is behind us. It becomes more complicated—tangled with cynicism, insecurity, comparison and the habit of living outside the present moment.

So at the end of each day, just try to remember the feeling of being a child. Find one small thing to be grateful for and let it carry you off to sleep.

My only tattoo is a simple script of a simple word—enough.

Because that one little word holds so much power. The power to feel good about ourselves or not.

My child is about to have a child of her own, and I'll tell her what my mom told me when I became a new mother: "If you blink, you'll miss it." She'd often say this, especially during the first five years. It was her way of reminding me to stay in the present moment.

The idiom dates from the late 19th century and describes something that passes by so quickly it's easily missed—even in the briefest moments of inattention.

Now more than ever, real discipline is needed to make sure that doesn't happen. With the onset of technology, we now hold a shiny screen that demands our attention, serving up tiny images of how motherhood should look, how it should feel, how it's the answer or the problem.

And if we're staring at that little black screen, we're not seeing our children. A well-rounded childhood has nothing to do with algorithms, product placement or fancy filters.

It has everything to do with being present.

Alchemy is transformative creativity. Magic. It's a power humans have, one we rarely tap into or even think about anymore. We need to think about it. It's the power of the imagination to turn straw into gold, the ordinary into extraordinary, grief into beauty.

When my daughter was a teenager, our family experienced deep loss, tragic events on top of tragic events. I wrote a book several years later as a way to process my grief and when she read it, she said—

"How did you make something so horrible into something so beautiful?"

I'll never forget that. It made me see the act of writing in a new light and made me realize that when I put pen to paper, I'm an alchemist. That was new to me, and she saw it first.

I want us to keep seeing it. To always be aware of what the human spirit and imagination can do, if we don't choose the path of least resistance or let fear and suffering take center stage.

Chaos is inevitable. It always has been and always will be. It's unpredictability, disorder, fierceness. Chaos makes canyons, breaking apart the land, tearing through, carving deep paths. Leaving behind unfathomable grandeur.

Exploding stars, violent, powerful, scattering tiny pieces of carbon, oxygen, and iron, the same things our bodies are made of. Leaving behind all of us.

It doesn't matter the time. Chaos is folded into the universe. So don't long for a simpler time; live a simpler life. Be the simple space you want to live in and don't respond to chaos with fear.

Fly above, take a bird's-eye view, and find a different perspective—flying, gliding, noticing all the unexpected, astonishing patterns that somehow suddenly appear.

My daughter feels things very deeply. When wildfires were burning near our old home, even though she was hundreds of miles away, she worried about the animals, plants, and wild spaces that were affected. She could feel the flames.

I listened and offered support, helped her avoid bottling up her emotions and encouraged her not to be hard on herself for feeling so deeply. She's learning to let her feelings rise up and move through and we're all going to need to do the same, as our beloved Earth faces massive changes.

There's power in embracing all our emotions, without picking and choosing what feels best. Shutting down or numbing ourselves is a slippery slope and can ultimately prevent us from fully experiencing the privilege of being human—the privilege of being alive.

Adversity occurs sporadically throughout life, especially for those fully engaged with the world. When we fall or are knocked down by disappointment, tragedy, or heartbreak, if we're able to recover and stand back up, we start developing resilience. If we don't, just like a muscle, it will atrophy over time.

It helps to construct a narrative—one that creates meaning, finds patterns, and builds coherence. My story is the Phoenix myth, which originated in ancient Greece around 300BC, yet still carries the same weight in our imaginations today: rising from the ashes, pain and suffering, followed by rebirth and renewal—brought to life in the image of the Phoenix, fiery red and glowing.

We all need to take time to find our own story of resilience—one that guides us and reminds us to stand back up.

My liminal dream emitted so much light that when I wrote my poem, I could barely find words for its brilliant luminosity.

My daughter and I are drawn to light—to the sun, bright colors, dappled shadows and sun-kissed waves. Our family coat of arms has a sun in the center of the shield and the description reads: The original arms bearer was a light to his people.

My father was a light to everyone he met. Spreading light is the most powerful answer to darkness.

I've been thrown into many dark places. Life has a way of doing that—there's no getting around it. But I've always had a light inside of me to help me find my way through. We all do. The astonishing light of our own being.

"When I walk outside, it's impossible to imagine that the wild doesn't know who I am."

This stanza is from a children's book I wrote about the reciprocity we find in nature. I remember so clearly the day I wrote those words. I was struggling to find my way into the project, so I stepped outside and noticed a small yellow butterfly flying all around me, the towering pines keeping watch, the cottonwoods dancing and waving.

How absurd, how impossible to think that we're not right now and always, in conversation with nature. And just like that, my book was born. This reciprocity will sustain us throughout our lives.

Another important way to look at this word is reciprocity in relationships—the back-and-forth that creates a healthy life. This will sustain us too.

You help me, I help you. You take care of me, I take care of you. You listen to me, I listen to you.

Equally important, though never easy, is letting go of relationships that aren't reciprocal. I'm glad my daughter saw me do this and how hard it was, but how necessary for my well-being. We need to be well—it's what lets us keep moving on our true path and gives us space to breathe.

For my daughter's sixth birthday, I decided a surprise party would be fun. I asked her friends to meet at Ben & Jerry's after school and hide until we arrived. She had no idea—she thought we were just getting ice cream.

When everyone jumped out, she looked like she'd been struck by lightning. But then she began to enjoy herself.

I've come to love the word surprise. I started noticing what happens to my body when I find delight in surprise.

And then one day as I was walking along the river trail, I thought about how a river never knows what it will find around each bend, yet it continues to flow. It's like a surprise party over and over and over again.

What a wonderful way to live.

A vital force—a way of moving through the world with our eyes wide open, and a deep sense of wonder. When I try to think of my life without curiosity, I can't. It's that important.

What's the standard definition of curiosity? A strong desire to learn or know more about something.

A child's definition? Why? Why? Why? How? When? How? Why? Wow!

A mother's definition? What propels us out into the world to explore, engage, and ask questions. To go on treasure hunts to find answers and along the way find out so many things about the world and ourselves. Curiosity allows for possibility, by creating a space where the unknown can become known.

When my husband and I were moving from the home we'd raised our daughter in, she came back one last time to say goodbye, to our house and to the land.

Acres of wild beauty that wrap itself around you: lush meadows, a pond, aspen and cottonwood trees, ponderosa pines, hawks, owls, deer and elk.

She and I were sitting in the meadow, and she started to cry. Change is folded into our journey, but saying goodbye to beloved places is incredibly difficult.

I told her how I've learned to process change: my soul feels like a tapestry, woven from every experience, every passage of my life. Important places are vast panels, pieces of who we are. I say are, in the present tense because those pieces remain with us even after we've left them behind.

And this tapestry—our soul—that we weave throughout our lives is what we will take with us when we leave this beautiful planet.

It's our magic carpet.

The importance of a word.

Imagine if the poet Mary Oliver had chosen a different word than wild, when she wrote:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

How would it have changed the magic and power that so many people feel when they read that beloved stanza? It would have changed it immensely. That one word makes the reader feel alive, and allows them to see their life in a more vast and astonishing way.

A life rooted in instinct, and open to a wilderness of possibility.

Possibility is the space where belief begins.

As an adult it's easier to live in this space if you have a childlike sensibility. I used to tell my daughter that if a giant blue bear walked up to our door one day, I wouldn't question it. I'd just be excited to see something so extraordinary.

There's so much available to us, if we don't limit ourselves or become afraid of the unknown. If we don't close the door on the blue bear.

As I've gotten older, I've found myself embracing the infinite possibilities of the universe—or maybe finally feeling the universe embracing me. I understand there's so much more out there that we can't see, but can feel deeply. All of this has changed me in profound ways.

We didn't raise our daughter in any organized religion, but when I share my spiritual experiences with her, they change her too. They give her an expansive place from which to contemplate just how miraculous our connectivity truly is.

Possibility is the space where miracles begin.

It's all a love story.

I started out writing a mother's love story, but the further I went, and sixty-some-odd years into this journey, I finally realize that it's all a love story. At the very heart of our time here, it's what we all ultimately long for—love.

And it can be found everywhere, not just in the foundational pieces where we think we should find it, but in every single touchpoint—love anywhere is love everywhere. If we can begin to see life this way, it becomes so much more fulfilling and beautiful.

At the end of his life, Maurice Sendak, the genius of children's literature, said "I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world."

My liminal dream was a blessing, so beautiful and transformative I knew I needed to share it. But I know a lot of people wouldn't have welcomed such a dream, because even an astonishing dream about death is still about dying.

There's so much fear wrapped around death—it's at the root of so much anxiety, driving the increasingly obsessive need to somehow prevent or deny the inevitable.

If I can share a vision of how this amazing ride might end, with light and comfort, it will be a lovely gift to give.

Let's go back to the beginning—the dream, the poem.

I wanted to try and understand the feeling I had when I first woke up. I knew it was unlike anything I'd felt before. It wasn't awe, fear, wonder or longing. It wasn't any of those things.

So I just started writing, to see if something might rise to the surface if I gave it time and space. And one word kept appearing: finite.

It hadn't been on my mind at all, and then suddenly, it was everywhere. I realized it was what made my dream different from my waking life, the absence of the finite.

Infinite didn't cross my mind at first. I think I had to feel the glaring absence of the finite, to find my way to infinity. Endings are hardwired into everything we do here on Earth—work days, school days, vacations, sporting events, meals, movies, books. Start to finish. Beginning to end.

So of course we wrap death up in that same space.

We have a finite time on earth. We have a finite time with each other.

Which breeds fear and urgency, panic and pain.

And then one day—an epiphany. I knew what I felt when I woke up from my dream:

A divine sense of time, ETERNITY and forever love, forever love, forever love…

When I first told my daughter about my dream, she said it gave her comfort. It gives me comfort too—because I now know deep down, that love has no time limit, no off switch.

When we leave Earth, the light does not go out. The light continues and continues and continues to burn bright, so we can feel each other, be with each other, forever.