by Laura Munson | Aug 20, 2017 | Musings
If you read me…you’re going to have to sit a spell. Pour a cup of something and pause. I refuse to go into sound bytes… With love, here is what I share with you today:
Somebody asked me the other day if I know how to receive without giving.
Huh. I’d never really thought about that before.
I proceeded to tell her how I’ve been trying to receive the beauty of Montana this summer, as a writer and seeker and feeler– just being, rather than always running to the next thing. Just being in my creativity before my writing retreat season begins in a few weeks. And then I started to tell her about the book I’m writing and how I think it will help a lot of people and and and–
She cut me off. “You were talking about receiving. Then you switched gears. And now you’re talking about giving. I asked you if you can receive…without giving.”
Ok, fine. She might have been a therapist I recently hired to help me get out of a period of life overwhelm with a kid in the throes of college recruitment, and wearing just too many damn hats in general.
I had no plain answer to offer her. “It’s not like I think of myself as some sort of Florence Nightingale or anything. I’m a gal who likes to take long baths and long walks and ride my horse. I try to grab moments for myself as much as my life will allow. And what’s wrong with a symbiosis of giving and receiving, anyway?”
She cut me off again. “What do you do now that is just about receiving? Especially from people?”
I thought about it. “Well, I love what I do for a living. I love what it feels like to help people fall in love with their words, their voice, their self-expression, Montana. When I see those lights go on and their faces soften and open to their truth…it’s the greatest gift I’ve known.”
Her face was deadpan and now with a dash of severity. “I’m talking about receiving from people without giving. Do you have an example of that in your current life?”
I scrolled through my daily life for the purely receiving peopled moments. I couldn’t think of any—not any I was exceptionally proud of.
“I have a great chiropractor,” I said.
“People you don’t pay,” she said.
“Well I have a lot of good friends,” I said. “A couple of them did nothing but listen to me when I was going through a rough patch a few years ago.”
“What about now? Now that you’ve gotten into the business of being of service.”
“Uh…” I thought of all the remarkable people in my life. And I thought about how when they give to me, I almost always feel the immediate compulsion to give back. Or feel guilty for not giving back. “Just plain ol’ receiving, huh. Did I say I take a lot of long baths?” I paused. “But I mean, the truth is, even when I take a bath, I feel a little guilty about it. Like I’m stealing the moment from something or someone. Guilty pleasure, I guess.”
She stared at me, holding her pen to her paper.
“I wasn’t brought up to feel pleasure. I was raised by World War II people. My mother’s famous line is: What do you think I do all day—sit around and eat bon bons???!!! We are not bon bon people.”
She stared at me.
Oh God—was I paying someone $150 to have them tell me I have to eat bon bons? I cut her to the chase, “I eat chocolate, you know. I enjoy good wine. I love to go out for dinner. I took my kids to Europe for Christmas last year. It’s not like I’m some kind of a deprivation-ist. It’s not like I get off on penury!”
She said, “Is receiving always about pleasure? What if it was about support?
Huh. Time was up. Thankfully.
So I went for both—pleasure and support: I went out for lunch with a friend who gives the best advice, who eats cheeseburgers and fries like they’re an entire food group, and who prides herself on day-drinking. I once told her that her porn star name would be Guilt-less Pleasure.
We sat in a dark pub on a sunny day. “Do you think it’s possible for you to receive without giving?” I asked her.
She didn’t skip a beat, dipping her French fry into a ketchup puddle, her gel-polished nails shining with the same color. “Of course. I love receiving gifts. I don’t just have a birthday week, I have a birthday month!” She guzzled her beer.
“A birthday month, huh,” I said, doing the same, pretending I like beer.
“Oh come on. You know how to have fun. You had a kick ass 30th, and 40th, and 50th birthday party. I was at all of them. I’ll never forget that lobster you flew in from Maine. Or that marimba band you hired in your back yard. And that Christmas party you used to throw. Straight up Dickens. With the lumineria all the way up the hill? Magic.”
I thought about it. “I do like to throw a good party. But this therapist I’m seeing would tell me that I’m doing it for my guests as much as I am for me. I don’t know how to throw a party for just me, I guess. Doesn’t sound like much fun, frankly.” Then I added, because I didn’t want to be pathetic, “I take a lot of baths, you know.”
She gave me the same deadpan look, but this time it was for free. Bonus!
“What’s wrong with me these days?” I said, staring at my cheeseburger. “Once upon a time, some would say that I was a hella good hedonist.”
She’s one of those friends who takes a question like that seriously. This time she pointed at me with her bloody French fry and her bloody fingernail. “You’re terrified of being called selfish. Aren’t you.”
Shit. The Call of the Bluff.
I stared at my hamburger, suddenly un-hungry.
She moved into her cheeseburger with vigor. “I bet someone called you selfish when you were a little girl, and you’ve been running from it ever since. That’s what I think.” Juice ran down her chin, and she wiped it and licked her finger. “But what do I know. I’m not a therapist. I’m just a single mother.” She winked at me.
I didn’t wink back. “I know I know. Selfishness is out. Self-preservation is in. Self-care is an industry. That’s why I finally hired a therapist. I need to figure out this Self-care thing.”
“I think she’s on the right track. I dare you to spend a week asking for help. Without giving a thing back to the people you ask.” The final French fry: “And not feeling guilty about it.”
The waiter came. “Can I get a To Go box?” I said.
So I spent the week not asking anyone for help. And feeling guilty about it. And even worse about how sorry I felt for myself that no one offered me help on their own. And how lame I feel with this new awareness that I don’t ask for it. And so instead, I hired a Self-care coach, just to practice. And then I felt pathetic for having a Self-care coach, and a therapist, when I’ve been such a glutton for the fact that I haven’t had a therapist for ten years. I’m so “evolved.” I can do life so “alone.” I “help” people for a living. I am of “service.” I take a lot of baths.
Shit.
Okay, so as it goes when you are wandering around with a blender head full of new awareness and longing and confusion…my car broke down in a parking lot. Dead battery. As I was coming out of a consultation, feeling very wonderful about helping someone construct their book project. Turned the key. Nuthin’. Turned it again. Shit. And me without my jumper cables.
I got out of my car and asked a few people if they could give me a jump, feeling very not wonderful about bothering them in the middle of their day. Neither of them had jumper cables. So I called Triple A. Tipped the guy $20, I felt so grateful. This receiving without giving thing wasn’t going so well.
And then today happened.
I drove the Going-to-the-Sun road through Glacier National Park to take a hike up at Logan Pass. I decided that it’s easier to receive from nature, and what better place to receive than this glorious part of the world—this definition of mountain majesty. The wildflowers were out in profusion—the rose and blue gentian, the lavender aster, the spiking fuchsia fireweed. The sky was blue, the clouds plump, the air pristine, the subalpine fir scenting it all with a heady elegance. Receive receive receive.
Human being walking by with nice smile.
Me, taking shameless selfie.
“Would you like me to take a picture of you standing on that rock? You look so happy!”
“Absolutely! Thank you!”
Click.
I started to ask if she’d like a photo of herself in return. But I stopped myself.
If she wants one, she’ll ask. Selfish of me? Nah.
I decided to lie down on the rock and just be– feel the sun baking me into the earth. So far so good. Nature, humans, all abundant. Receive receive receive. And this feeling of great wholeness overtook me. Was it pleasure I was feeling? Maybe not. It was more like support, like the therapist said. This rock, this warm rock on this mountain top, held me. I had everything I needed in that moment—warmth, water, space, time. People around if I needed help. Beauty resplendent in 360. Receive receive receive.
And I thought, I feel relief right now. I feel detonated. Deactivated. Benign. Neutral. I need to lie on more rocks in a place that is neutral. Yes, neutral is what I’ll go for. Not accelerate. Not brake. Not give. And maybe not receive. Just find this place of neutral at least once a day. Maybe when I wake. Or when I feel spent. If there’s something to receive, it’s this. This is the gift. I’ve been trying too hard. Maybe receiving happens when we stop giving.
So, wouldn’t you know…when I got back to my car, in this mountain-top parking lot, my battery was dead again. And I’d forgotten my jumper cables again. In my defense, I’m loaning out my sturdy Suburban with all the bells and whistles to my son, and am driving the “kid car,” and apparently haven’t learned one thing about life in Montana after twenty-five years.
The day was waning. It wasn’t quite an emergency, but I knew that I would absolutely have to go Blanche DuBois, whether I liked it or not. So with the dependence on the kindness of strangers bannered across my forehead, I bothered car after car, asking for a jump. All tourists. No luck. The Visitor’s Center didn’t have cables either. “I promise you, someone out there will give you a jump. You just have to ask,” the ranger told me.
Shit.
I liked neutral much better than ye olde ask and…
So I went back into the parking lot, hating to bug all of those nice travelers, fresh off their mountain high, to dig into their trunks, and my engine.
I asked two guys fitting fishing poles into backpacks. “Hey, do you have jumper cables?”
They looked at each other. “Yeah. But we can’t give you a jump or we’ll lose our parking place.”
My hamburger friend’s line blared at me with bloody shiny fingertips: God, I’m so selfish for forgetting my jumper cables. God, I’m so selfish for not getting my battery looked at. God, I’m so selfish for working so hard that I don’t have my priorities straight. God, I’m so selfish for taking the day off to play in the mountains and lie on rocks and be in neutral when I have a list a mile long of things that need to get done for my kids, and my career, and my house, and duh—my car. I’m so selfish.
And frankly, I don’t know how it happened. But apparently God responds to self-loathing mind rants. Because suddenly, there was a gang of smiley people all gathered around me, with a petite woman with long black hair taking charge like we were on Survivor. She pointed at people and things and my car and me, and I took her orders.
“Get in your car,” she said. “Put it in neutral.”
Yep. Neutral.
And four strapping men stood at my hood and one of them shouted, “Push!”
Another strapping guy was at my window saying, “Crank the wheel,” and I said, “which way?” and he reached in and grabbed the steering wheel and cranked it for me. “Now brake,” he said. And I braked.
“Pop the hood,” another one said.
“Uh…this is my daughter’s car. Not sure I…” like I’d never driven a car in my life, and never dealt with one crisis moment in my life, and believe me…normally I am the woman with the long black hair. Two weeks ago I was galloping through a Montana meadow while a horse bled out, to get help. (The horse is fine.)
But I was just…frozen with all this help.
And this guy reached in to my car and pulled a lever and the hood popped, and there was a truck, a bright blue truck, hood to hood with my car, and people were “operating” on my engine, and I was just out-of-body, cable to cable, charge to charge, until one of them shouted, “Turn your key.” And I obeyed.
The car started. Everybody clapped. Surgery successful. The girl with the black hair hollered, “God Bless America!”
I wanted to jump out of my car and hug them all and ask them where they were from and offer them local’s advice about where to go in Glacier, and in the Flathead Valley, and to take down their names and send them thank you notes, and heck, invite them all over for dinner. But I didn’t. I just said, “Thank you. May someone do something nice for you today.”
And I drove off.
And yeah…I felt a little stupid. But more than that, I felt supported. And what I didn’t feel…was selfish. Not in the least.
And when I came home and told my story to my hamburger friend, she said, “Has the Universe ever not supported you, Laura?”
And as much as I wanted to say, There have been times when it hasn’t…the truth is that no. Never. I’ve always had support.
I just have to live in a way that lets me find it. And that might mean that I have to ask. But mostly, that means that I have to receive the support that is all around me.
If you would like to take a break this fall and live the writer’s life in the woods of Montana, find community, find your voice, and maybe even find yourself…check out this video and info, and email the Haven Writing Retreat Team asap to set up a phone call!
September 6-10 (FULL)
September 20-24 (FULL)
October 4-8 (FULL)
October 18-22 (one spot left)
February 21-25 (now booking)
The rest of the 2018 schedule to be announced…
Follow me on Facebook for more news, community, and inspiration!
by Laura Munson | Jan 8, 2017 | The Writing Life
So now what?
Not very long ago, I was told that I would lose my life as I was used to living it. “Fasten your seatbelt,” someone said—someone who’d recently been through a divorce, lost her house, her children half the time, her dignity. Her face had the map of near-catastrophe to show for it. As I looked down the unconscionable barrel of divorce, another recent divorcee said, “Out of the two of you, I put my money on the pony that is you.” I looked at her dumbfounded. I had never been the bread winner. I was the hearth keeper and full-time mother. That was the agreement from the beginning and for twenty years, and I had put all of my security and dreams into the life we had created, the house, the land, the marriage, the co-parenting. So, I was fetal with fear, trying to figure out how to get out of bed and have the courage for tea, never mind total reinvention worthy of a good bet.
According to statistics, my parting husband, the mediator, and most everyone I knew, I was going to have to down-size. The house was in foreclosure, I didn’t have health insurance, savings, a job, or any income whatsoever. How was this possible for a smart, savvy, well-educated, well-raised, feminist mother? That’s what I asked myself on a rolling tape that tsunami-d over me until I was barely holding the weeds at the bottom of the ocean of fear, and worst of all, shame.
Another divorcee said, “I promise you…in one year’s time…your life will be better than you could ever imagine it. I promise.” I hate when people act like they have a crystal ball. But I held on to that promise, because I wasn’t sure what else to hold on to except the fact that my kids were thriving and my motherhood was too. That’s all that mattered to me. Getting out of bed, facing the day, getting through it with some level of grace, and being there to be the mother that I had always been, even when they weren’t with me, even when half of their lives was totally outside of my control.
In those impossible moments, their bedrooms empty, no homemade dinners to serve, no sleepy morning breakfast heart-to-hearts, no lunches to make and wrap with little loving notes…I surrendered myself to the foundation I had given them and the fact that they’d eaten enough organic food to counter-balance whatever they now were being served—they could survive on fruit cups and Jello and supermarket rotisserie chicken, and whatever else was now their reality…couldn’t they? In those grueling dark nights of the soul, I took heart. One year from now. Better. How was this possible?
What wings?
What could make life better? I was told I had to start looking at condos in town. I would lose the land that held my little family and all our sledding parties, birthday parties, Christmas caroling and luminaria, a million walks with six dogs, raptors riding thermals over our heads as we picked splinters and told jokes, played cards by candlelight, coyotes echoing it all back to us in the night. A condo in Montana? I couldn’t think of anything more counter-intuitive for the life I had set up, curated, procured, and which gave me infusions every day, as a once wife, always mother, and woman who needs her muse to run naked in the woods.
I have always been stubborn and when I lack the practical common sense behind my convictions, there is a question that I ask and it has guided me well since I was a little girl: What can I create?
So sitting there in my house one day, crying in fear and desperation, I asked myself: What can I create? How can I keep my house, my land, my children’s lives from unravelling any more than they already have? This was never something I imagined for them, or for any of us. How can I make this work? What do I know how to do?
At that point I’d published a New York Times and international bestseller, and as always was working away on more book projects, but even so, the writing process takes time, and the publishing world is complex. The long and short of it was that I was in deep financial trouble with no immediate practical way out that I could see. I’ll spare you the gory details. And myself too. Here’s where the hope lives and why I’m sharing this with you: On that day, I put my fear and shame to the side and opened my mind to the world of possibility. If my friend said she’d put her money on the pony that she said was me, and my other friend promised that my life would be markedly better in a year…what could I see for myself? What did I know how to do that could be fairly and significantly monetized? But not find me selling out my dreams, my writing, my total dedication to my true purpose. My sole true purpose was mothering and writing, wasn’t it? What else was congruent with who I am?
Open your heart, mind, arms…and jump! Trust in your wings!
Well…I knew how to write. I knew how to sit myself down and write no matter what was going on in my life, and always had. It had gotten me through hard times and it had resulted in published work that landed in people’s hearts. I could speak about perseverance and dealing with rejection and the practical application of philosophies I’d learned along the way in the realm of emotional freedom and empowerment. I could be transparent, vulnerable, heart-in-the-hand honest and loving. I was natural at leadership and well-seasoned in the dynamics of intimate groups and how to keep them safe and healthy. I could create and hold the space for people to find their way to these life-lines which had been my guide for years. And I could come up with very relatable and inspiring exercises to help people learn what I’d learned– to help people give themselves permission to find their unique voice and express it, using the power of the written word. And as if in Shakespearean choir…a few other friends with crystal balls had whispered Writing Retreat in my ear for months. I hadn’t really listened until that moment when I knew I could not live by fear any longer if I was ever going to get to the other side.
Without a whole lot more rumination, (I’ve found that fearlessness works best that way), I put it on Facebook: Anyone want to go on a writing retreat in Montana with me? In two hours, twenty-four people signed up, and Haven Writing Retreats was born. Five years and four hundred people later, if there was a race to be betted on, and a winner’s circle and wreath of roses around my neck…and a lucky person who gambled on the longshot, I can say with humble-pride that maybe some people deserve their crystal balls. I can say that I am grateful for their confidence when I didn’t have it for myself, never mind my future. And I can say that it is absolutely possible that you can take exactly who you are and turn it into a business, a career, and even financial stability.
Winged Victory!
Whether you’re a single mother going through a divorce, or recently fired from your job, or in re-invention without a view into your future at all…ask yourself this powerful question: What can I create? It may be right under your nose. And it may be some of the most important work of your life.
And even if you’re not, even if you have all the security in the world in the people, places, and abundance of your life…never take it for granted. Don’t live in fear of the rug being ripped out from underneath you. But do know what your passions are and live them with all your might. I’m glad then, that my passions were in a row when the rug got ripped out from under me, even if my ducks weren’t. Passions are mine-able. Anyone can be an alchemist, if they have something powerful to work with. And the most powerful matter I know…is the truth of who you are, the special way you have of showing up in the world, where you find the ease of true power and purpose, and give yourself permission to live it, use it, be it.
The field of possibility…
Happy 2017 from my family to you!
So as we enter 2017, to all of us who are toiling to see brightness in our future, or a future at all…take heart. If I could have seen that day in my world of hurt, what this Holiday season looked like, I wouldn’t have been able to believe my eyes. I would have seen a mother and her children in Paris, eating macarons in a beautiful boutique hotel, old and new friends feasting over long dinners of delectable food, laughter and love, toasting and fond reminiscing. Smiles that beamed as bright as the Eiffel Tower at midnight, and as deeply and wisely as the Mona Lisa’s, and as mystically as the Gregorian chants in a candle-lit Notre Dame. I would have seen a mother and her young adult children– a trio so powerfully woven as they walked the medieval streets of Bruges, Belgium holding hot chocolate and Gluhwein, basking in the Dutch countryside, caves and chateaux where earls and knights once lived, writing wishes for each other on slips of paper for 2017. And I would have seen them in a holy pause for a week in Amsterdam in a 17th century little house around the corner from the Westerkerk that kept Anne Frank’s hope alive, chiming every fifteen minutes as if to remind us that we are here, and we are together and we are not just thriving. We are happy.
P.S. And I kept our house…and am deeply into three books, hopefully coming to your bookshelf sooner than later…
A Slice of Haven Writing Retreats: [slideshow_deploy id=’9411′]
Now Booking Haven Writing Retreat 2017 (ranked in the top 3 writing retreats in the US!)
You do NOT have to be a writer to come…just a seeker…looking for your VOICE!
February 22-26 (one spot left)
June 7-11
June 21-25
September 6-10
September 20-24
October 4-8
October 18-22
Recent Comments