The Great Wide Somewhere

On leaving the provincial townsfolk of our minds behind

Earlier this week, I was unloading the dishwasher for the third time in three days, goaded onward by an inner voice that sits on my shoulder and tells me how to be a Good Mom. I could have waited until morning, but with the arrival of Covid in our home, things have been more chaotic than usual.¹ Having grown up under unpredictable conditions as a child, I felt a kind of familiar manic eldest-daughter pressure to keep things under control. But I could feel my body drooping and dragging its feet, even as my mind spurred me onward to complete this One Last Task. The one that would cement my reputation as a Good Person in the eyes of everyone around me, once and for all. (Can you relate?)

Right in the middle of doing so, though, a rebellion welled up in me. I turned to my son, who was finishing his dinner at the counter, with a mad gleam in my eye. I flung my arms open, and said, quite spontaneously, “I want more than this provincial life! I don't want to be unloading this dishwasher by myself anymore. I need some help!” 

My son immediately recognized the words from Belle’s epic number in Beauty and the Beast, because we've watched the 2017 edition approximately 4,000 times recently. (We appear to have a family-wide crush on Emma Watson.) He got down from his stool at the kitchen counter. He danced over to the dishwasher, took all the silverware from the bottom rack, and put it away for me. 

Did it go smoothly? No. He is four. My silverware drawer now looks like burglars have gone through it looking for loot. 

The important thing is this:

Once I decided that I was done doing the same uninspiring old thing over and over again, and put out my call to the world that I wanted something different for myself, truly magical forces (if I do say so myself) came to my aid. 

My son at Untermeyer Gardens, headed my way.

There is a moment like this in so many of our modern folk tales – which always reflect the times in which they are told. Ariel, Jasmine, Belle, Moana and Elsa all belt out chest-swelling songs in Act I of their respective Disney stories about getting away from their mundane everyday lives and stifling cultural expectations. (They also share DNA with Buttercup in The Princess Bride, a movie we discussed on this recent thread.) These cultural expectations vary in terms of their inherent challenge and ambition – Elsa and Moana, as more modern women, have at least a local political post to take over, whereas it is unclear what Ariel’s future role is meant to be, under the sea. (Future Real Housewife? Influencer? Please comment below with your theories.) Buttercup is unambiguously kidnapped by the world's most boring prince, who is not even that into her; he plans to use her as a pawn in his equally boring political pursuits. Hers is a particularly future-less future. 

These protagonists are not failures because they don't want to dutifully read from the cultural scripts they’ve been given. They are not lacking in #gratitude or in need of a stronger dose of Lexapro. They are strong women with their instincts intact, as the mythologist Clara Pinkola Estes would say.

Like many of us when we feel a growing sense of tension inside between “should” and “want to,” these characters know inside that they deserve better guides, allies and directions than they’ve been given. Their adventures begin, and their allies arrive, when they finally find the courage to declare this out loud.

The relationships between these deeply-principled princesses and their transgressive masculine counterparts, such as The Man in Black or The Beast, are read in some circles as Jungian representations of the anima and animus. The animus, or acting force, is a yang-like energy that arises to complement and protect the anima, or sacred feminine, a yin-like energy that reveals to us what is truly worthy of our devotion. When these timeless allies come together in folk tales or movies, they create a powerful union between what Buddhists might term right aim and right effort.² In other words: love, true love.

I recently found myself feeling uninspired and anxious at the start of the year as I considered some of my goals in progress. Upon further reflection, I realized that too many of these goals felt like the creative versions of wanting a perfectly clean kitchen, with all the dishes put away and everything under control. Goals centered around earning public accolades or money or both, instead of around honing my craft or expanding my capacity for presence and joy. Of course the part of me that is wild, alive, adventurous – that has its instincts intact – has been dragging its feet. (Maybe you too?)

Interestingly, for some items of my to-do list, the inverse was actually true. This happens to me all the time: Part of me may be very ready to ride off in pursuit of the great wide somewhere, but the provincial townspeople who live rent-free in my mind are rising up against that part to stop me. Their role is to tell me that it is irresponsible, misguided, or even ungrateful, to consider leaving behind the glittering opportunities available to me if I simply go quietly back into my pen, as

Heather Havrilesky

puts it.

Ironically, it is the arrival of my worst inner critics that lets me know that I’m likely on the path to something wilder, badder, and better.

Either way, for many of us, I find our motivation necessarily flags when we find ourselves battling this tension between “should” and “want to.” When I sense this tension in the people I teach, I very rarely encourage them to double down on whatever goal they have set and just try harder. I ask them, instead, if there is some other story besides this one that they would secretly rather tell. Once they are able to admit that yes, there is something else I want, the project glides to completion with less effort, not more.

My cavalry, arriving.

So what can we do to re-align our bodies and minds – to figure out which castle’s actually worth storming this year, and kick off the action in the right direction? 

I have a few ways that I do this, and will offer them below. May they be of benefit to anyone facing a similar dilemma.

First, I gather inspiration for myself by considering different enclosures I have already built or escaped, and those of my friends. Some of their stories live here — for example, Molly Bolton’s story of calling off her Christian marriage, and enrolling in “queer divinity school” instead, or the many initiations that led to Das Rush coming out as trans and then becoming a dad. I remind myself that wanting more than this provincial life is my birthright, as it is theirs.

Secondly, I read stories of other creative thinkers who got free and told the others. Over the break, I revisited several, including Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Glennon describes the way she tussled with her mother after leaving her marriage to a man to marry soccer star Abby Wambach. Abby, in my humble opinion and in Glennon’s³, is every bit as alluring as The Man in Black, and well worth the risk. Glennon’s mother, however, was not so convinced. She grappled for long months with not just her own internalized homophobia, but her fears of how her daughter and her daughter's children would be ostracized in a potentially homophobic world. 

Glennon loves her mother, but being around her mother during this vulnerable time of initiation was making it more difficult for her to tune into what she calls her Knowing. Her instinct. Because what Glennon’s mother thought was best for Glennon wasn’t what Glennon thought was best for herself. 

It’s very difficult to hear yourself singing “I want much more than this provincial life” when the people closest to you – especially our mothers, the people against whose lives many of us measure the possibilities of our own – are urging you back into that smaller, tighter place from which you are trying to escape.

Abby, in command of her Knowing and channeling the archetypal animus, suggested that in this case, they imagine their new home as a castle, with a drawbridge that goes up or down. The drawbridge only allows love to come in, Abby explained, and the drawbridge only allows love to come out. Fear has no place in their castle. Especially not fear regarding the true love of the denizens inside.

Knowing how much Glennon loves her mother, despite her mother’s fears, Abby also adds this important nuance:

The people we love are welcome to join us in our spaces of initiation, but their conformity-focused fears and discomforts are not. 

So now we have this image of a castle. We have the image of a creator inside, who wants much more than this provincial life. And we have unseen forces⁴ marshaling in her favor, that want to help her do something else – that want to liberate her in ways big and small. She'll have to accept a little bit of chaos and discomfort. It won't be as easy as if she continued to do the same old thing in the same old way, every single day. But it’s worth it.

As Glennon writes, “A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter. When she finally understands that she is creating something different from what her parents created. When she begins to build her island not to their specifications but to hers.” 

When I feel unsure about whether my goal is the right one, I bring to mind the image of an enclosure like this. Sometimes it is a castle; sometimes a walled garden; sometimes simply a cozy bungalow, with a window I can open or close to different possibilities.

When I feel fear or cultural invitations to conform seizing my body around a particular goal or person, I know it is time to close the window, pull up the drawbridge, and reconsider my creative boundaries. When I sense the opportunity for spaciousness, adventure, true love, or the chance to cause what John Lewis calls “good trouble” — I open.

My new, short list of goals for January: Invite more constructive chaos, help and silly singalongs into my domestic to-do list. Use the spoons I acquire in the process to linger a bit longer in my son’s room around bedtime, telling him stories written for him, like this one, that invite him to tap into his own reserves of resilience and imagination. And spend more time reading and writing for myself once he’s asleep, including some work on longer-term projects that don’t come with many external accolades or rewards. Projects that even scare me a little, in the who do I think I am? kind of way that gets my smallminded internal townsfolk all fired up— but that also represent the satisfaction of deeper creative desires that I’ve now put off for far too long. That felt sense of approaching the great wide somewhere.

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This weekend, I’ll be jumping out of two new creative windows along these lines. And I’d love for you to join me.

Window #1: I’ll be offering up a free meditation in this newsletter, based on the Windows Open, Windows Closed visualization described above. I have been teaching mindfulness in my classes for years, but I don’t typically post meditations here, so this will be an experiment for me. If this is of interest to you, please subscribe and it will come to your inboxes soon.

Window #2: I’ll be reading my work in real life on Friday Jan 12, with other parents who are attempting to create despite the (s)mothering cultural expectations placed on us. The info for the event, (s)mother stories, is below, and it also lives in share-able form here. If you live in the tri-state area, I hope you’ll join us! 

1. For the record: at the time of this writing, my husband was still isolating due to Covid, which is why he was not unloading the dishwasher himself. Much like Westley in the Princess Bride, he knows that fetching the pitchers for me is the way to my heart, and he typically does so with heroic aplomb.

2. If you’re interested in a deep dive into the connections between The Princess Bride and Buddhism, I heartily recommend Ethan Nichtern’s book on this subject, The Dharma of the Princess Bride.

3. Is there any Elder Millennial mother who is not on a first-name basis with Glennon and Abby by now? “Doyle & Wambach” sounds like the straightest imaginable menswear brand; I just can’t bring myself to write that here in this context.

4. My thanks to

Jacqueline Church

for introducing this lovely phrase in last week’s discussion thread.