My Creative Journey
My path to being a writer/poet and a therapist was calling to me at a very young age. The acorn defined itself and the oak began the journey to the sky, learning with each leaf how it was meant to grow. I headed directly towards my avocation of clinical therapist and took my writer along with me.
Sitting at our family dinner table was my first instruction. My parents who had lost a child before my birth, sat with their meals and went through their lives with unspoken, ungrieved emotions. It was both troublesome and surprising that as a very young girl I could feel the pain, the
yearning to be seen, the loss, the hope, the full spectrum of an inner life. It became my daily lesson plan to figure out what was happening at that table, why it was happening, and explore the effects on my family. My mother carried her sadness linked with fear close to the surface. She participated in her life fully, as large as she could without letting the world in on her secrets: her early abuse, and her unspeakable grief for my younger dead brother. This never came out straight but leaked through her sudden shifts in behavior or energy, or sometimes with passion about injustice in the world. She cooked and tried to nurture all of us while skipping the part of doing the same for herself. My father’s story was quieter, passive, impotent and broken by his early status of abandoned orphan. His aura was often quiet and lost, but he was also generous and friendly to those around him. He was someone I suspect never felt good enough, not trusting to let anyone inside. My parent's early lives each carried unspeakable traumas, which manifested in moments of behavior that was difficult to understand and survive as a child. My older brother and I coped in significantly different ways. I have just one memory of him being very kind to me when our lives were falling apart around us, mostly we stayed withing ourselves, trying to find our separate. path to our furure In these early times, there were the lessons: Lean in and find the truth beneath the behaviors and words that were not what they seemed.
In high school and college, I wrote some things that got the attention and interest of my English teachers but even then, I knew the time was not right for that aspect of my life to come forward. It was forming, baking like one of my mother’s cakes, not quite ready to come out of the heat. Deep within myself I have always trusted that the time for writing would arrive. Just like I knew that I would be a therapist before I quite knew what that meant, I have known that my life as a writer would happen before I died. It wasn’t like I was waiting for it. I was busy with my work, my own personal path to balance, sanity if you will, a knowing and accepting of what defects had been molded into me and what talents I might have.
It was perfect training to be a therapist, and I got good at it well before I hit the post graduate courses when there were actual clients in front of me. The writer was sittingin the back of the classroom for all these internal lectures and seminars, quietly taking in the discipline of observing, respecting, and finding the language that lived in the world but was not audible. Words became my friend, the key that turned the lock open to my own journey to heal myself and later help others. Eventually I was able to live in the luxury of using them to interact with the natural world and my community. Words came to amplify experiences, create a space, a conduitof sorts, to what Jung called the “Collective Unconscious” and what some people call their muse, or simply inspiration. Words defined my life and words saved me.
I have a fragile inner life that I have protected and nurtured. When life wanted me to cover and armor up, I moved in the opposite direction. Always an elusive endeavor but I knew the value of that more delicate side of myself, the one that feels and looks at the world beyond the surface of things. Despite how hard the world tried to make me cynical or jaded, a reasonable reaction to my isolation, confusion and abuse, I have always been able to keep that part of me safe and cared for. I survived a painful and lonely childhood, but instead of closing down, I have nurtured, with lots of help along the way, my ability to both process what I am seeing and be present. To feel. It serves me now in that I can sit with things like the mindless destruction of our mother planet and still believe in and move myself to act on her behalf. I can ride the humming rhythms of the planet. I can take the temperature of the person in front of me. I can sit with people in pain. I can relax into the blessings, and comfort in the natural world, and I can love deeply and grieve what I need, and trade what I have for what will come. All essentials for the deep work of writing.
I love this journey that we all share, struggling to find out what being human means. Whether I am writing about the surf, or an axed tree or a disabled child who wants only to be in a pool of water, I love writing about it, descending into it, bringing us all through the portal of words to have more access to empathy, understanding and participation at a richer level.
Nearly 20 years ago, after a very challenging medical issue which followed two knee replacements, my life took a turn, and I was unable to work for many months. I eventually chose to leave my private practice and retire. It was time, and although I didn’t realize it consciously, my writer self was moving into place. So, I decided, in a somewhat subdued, some might say depressed state, to dig all of my past writing out of the file cabinets, floppy drives, notebooks and journals, and see just what was there. Concurrently I was asked to create/curate a multimedia event in San Luis Obispo to celebrate “Poetry Month”. Those two challenges overlapped and as the event came together so did my first collection, High Rain, which was eventually published in 2019. The event was attended by over 200 people and gave me credibility and entrance into the community of poets in this county. I began attending the many monthly or bimonthly gatherings in all the major cities nearby and was participating in open mics, book launches etc. There were articles in local papers and magazines giving me some legitimacy that I had never experienced in this realm. I had entered this second calling for myself. I felt like I had come home.
When the pandemic arrived shortly thereafter, I was able to dive into the isolation with a fated but tenuous sense of belonging to my craft. That was nearly a decade ago. My most recent book, my eighth published collection, Dwelling, hit the bookstores last fall and I feel like I am right where I am supposed to be in my life.
My challenges are like those of every working artist: self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and learning to listen and hear the muse when the ideas come and having the discipline to get them down on paper before they escape into the ether. I have been in the trenches with all the usual things, finding the rhythm to when and how to write, learning to edit, and edit again and again and learning how to encourage and critique work, both for myself and others in critique groups.