My older brother fell drunk in his own campfire a few years ago and died a couple days later at the University of Utah Burn Trauma Unit. He was fifty-seven years old.

He’d been up in our camping spot at the Dugway, a place we’ve camped at for fifty-plus years, along with our ancestors before us. He was surrounded by quaking aspen, and his name was carved into many of them—all across the Wasatch Plateau, in fact. Some are just initials, but most bear his name, Troy Hansen. Some are so weathered they’re almost illegible except for a few letters forming clumps of black scars on white bark.

In the spot a few feet from where he fell, his father’s name is carved. A sentinel watching the whole thing unfold, perhaps finding the scene all too familiar.

My name is up there too. From the early 1970s in a spot we call the Cow Camp where my grandfather herded sheep and cows. In 1989, up at Dry Creek, inside a crooked heart alongside an old sweetheart who died so soon after we’d carved it during an elk scout that the scars hadn’t fully formed. So are my father’s. My ex-husband’s. My grandfather’s. My uncles. All of them gone now.

I wonder if our quaking aspens are part of one underground organism like Pando in Fishlake National Forest, which is just 83 miles south of me as the crow flies. Even if they’re not, they feel like one organism to me, all connected with one root system of my family, our memories, and our ways of being.

Troy was always in charge of the fire when we camped. He loved every single aspect of it: chopping the wood, tossing on a bit more lighter fluid than was necessary, ignoring the fire bans, and tending the coals until they were cold and Cygnus the swan had flown far to the west, almost out of sight.

On this particular day, he’d gone camping alone with a case of beer bungeed onto the back of his four-wheeler and his cracked iPhone full of country music. He didn’t put much stock in material things and mostly wore the same camouflage shorts and Harley Davidson bandana with a knife on his belt.

We’ll never know for certain what happened, but we do know that despite how badly he was burned, he was able to crawl to the camp trailer and call a friend who took him to our local hospital where he was then life-flighted to the U of U. Me, my mom, and my little brother drove up and met my sister and her husband from Wyoming in the parking lot of the hospital. I had been hauling hay earlier that day, and before we all fell into bed after seeing him, I took off my pants on the white marble floor of our hotel bathroom and alfalfa flew everywhere.

The next morning when the doctor told us he couldn’t survive due to the extent of his burns over 38% of his body, along with his other health issues, we had to make the decision to take him off of life support. They took out the breathing tubes and decreased the medications that were keeping him asleep, and he was alert enough to ask for a beer and to get the f*ck out of there. He didn’t know he wouldn’t be going home.

I wanted so badly to tell him. It pained me to think that he didn’t know. I would want to know and say the things in my heart. But when I asked his doctor if we might tell him, she disagreed, saying it would make him too anxious and cause him suffering.

So instead, we played Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, and Glen Campbell, and despite the severity of his injuries, he played air guitar to the music and sang a line from “Folsom Prison Blues,” along with a refrain from “Rhinestone Cowboy.” My brother and brother-in-law went to pick up a single Budweiser, and we wetted a one-inch sponge and doused his lips with it.

Since that day that he died in the fall of 2022, I’ve had eleven more deaths in my life. People I loved. Two dogs that were like my children. A horse that I poured every ounce of my energy into healing.

I admit to feeling not unlike poor ol’ Job over these last few years. So much so that I recently asked a Jungian analyst if all this loss and suffering had caused me to become negatively inflated like some kind of heroic sufferer. When she didn’t answer my question, I wrestled it to the ground myself over the next few days.

No, I’m not a heroic sufferer.

There’s nothing heroic about it.

I’m simply judging my own descent. Worrying that folks view me as some kind of Debbie Downer of Death. “Waaahh, waaahhh.” I often feel a sense of deep shame when I share my experiences.

In this bout of wrestling with myself, I remembered an incident with a good friend of mine who was a Law of Attraction coach. We used to spend a fair amount of time together until my father died in 2018. After his death, she and I were on the phone, and I was deep in grief. She couldn’t hang up fast enough, and not too long after our call she wrote a blog post about not letting other people bring your vibe down by listening to their woes. The picture she used for the blog was particularly poignant. It was of a woman with her palm facing the camera as if to say “STOP!”

I have the sense that some folks are simply terrified that you’re going to drag them down into your abyss. They’re petrified, really. Sometimes even superstitious. Like how I feel about my coffee mug that says, “Not today, Satan” that I can’t bring myself to drink out of lest I be struck dead myself.

But it’s not just death people don’t want to engage with. Two friends with cancer diagnoses shared similar feelings with me this year. How people simply couldn’t hold even the mention of their illnesses. One of my friends said, “People want you to rush to the happy ending.” They sure as hell don’t want to hear about the scary beginning, or the messy middle. Or the chemo. The radiation. The fear. The uncertainty.

I’ve realized though that when people do share, it’s the judgment they fear the most. Some of the most powerful coaching sessions I’ve ever done have revolved around simply listening to what is. The first thing you see on their face is the pain. Then the hesitancy. And then the questioning. Can you hold this? Can you sit and be witness in my pain? Can you accept that this is how I feel without trying to change it? It’s never about giving them a tool or telling them it’s not real. It’s not even necessarily about them finding some answer. It’s about being a witness to their descent and letting it be exactly what it is. I’m not sure we can surface without having been seen and heard first.

It’s hard to be with what is.

Packed in an SUV four years almost to the day after losing Troy, my family drove up our mountain amidst the fruit-loop colored leaves. On the drive back, my niece told us a story about Pando and its massive underground system and how some plants can sense danger through that root system. Her teacher had shared a theory that during the wildfires in Fishlake, Pando may have received a “warning” of the threat of fire via the network of connected trees and saplings, which could then send signals to protect the mother tree from danger by pulling energy from other plants and holding on to water.

It reminded me that Troy had been having mini strokes, and that in totally separate moments for each of us, my mom, my little brother, and I all had an inexplicable feeling that he wouldn’t be with us for much longer. Our network of connectedness, its own warning of what would come.

I’d been working on this essay for weeks, futzing with aspens as a colony and the root system metaphor, deleting, angsting, all the things I do when I write, when Michael Meade put out a podcast called “Myths of Loss and Renewal.” I was out in the barn mucking the stalls, breathing in the horses, when Meade shared how he too went through a period of loss after loss after loss.

I almost dropped the poop fork when he said, “I started to feel like I was in an ongoing funeral.” He told his listeners how isolated he felt, how helpless, and “on the edge of being hopeless.” And in that moment, I felt not so alone in the world. And not so judged. Then, in his wisdom, he handed me the perfect words I’d been searching for in this essay: “…at the bottom of things, if I allowed myself to descend with the grief and the sorrow and the sense of loss that I had anyway, at the bottom I wouldn’t find emptiness, but would find instead something of the stem and the root of immortal things, of timeless things, of eternal things, that at the bottom of the world where people worry that it’s just an endless dark pit, there can be found something like the roots of eternity, as if the eternal world tries to enter from the broken grounds of loss and sorrow, and especially of descent.”

Just two days after Troy died, I found something that absolutely felt like eternity to me. I was out by my chicken coop tending to Niles Cogburn Crane and his lady birds, May Belle and June Bug. When I picked up the dustpan I use to clean their coop I saw a dead creature in full-on camouflage. I took a picture and called my younger brother to ask what it was.

“A salamander,” he said.

I hung up the phone, and this little guy came to and started walking towards me. I stood there, frozen, watching its little feet pick their way across the pebbles. I picked up my phone again and asked Google what a salamander symbolizes.

And I shit you not:

“The salamander represents immortality, rebirth, passion, and the ability to withstand flames.”

I held my breath for a good minute before I asked what type of salamanders were found in Utah and was met with this. “These amphibians are rarely seen. Tiger Salamanders spend most of their year underground, in moist burrows beneath logs and among tree roots. They come to the surface just once a year, emerging at night in the early spring to trek across the snow to newly-thawed wetlands.”

But it wasn’t spring.

It was the middle of September.

During broad daylight.

And this salamander hung around for two days. Eventually ending up at my back door along with a fair number of worms. When I told my mom about it, she burst into tears. Apparently, Troy used to find both of these creatures and would put them in his pockets when he was little, and she’d find their remnants in the bottom of her washing machine.

Something that spends most of its life underground amongst roots. Emerging out of its time. Following me even though it’s supposedly skittish.

It explains the smile on my face at my brother’s service.

It’s not like I think Troy became a salamander (though the camo threw me, I’m not going to lie). But I do feel deeply curious when I think of that little guy and how energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

And the salamander’s image is now tattooed on my arm. My own scar.

Because you’re a paid subscriber (thanks oodles for supporting my work), I’ve created a companion which I hope you’ll consider more of an excavation than something to add to your to-dos.

This isn’t about pressure. Rather,…

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I’m not a mother. And I’m on the fence as to whether I had any say in the matter.

My first surgery for a hemorrhagic cyst on my left ovary occurred just two days after my thirtieth birthday party (which totally explains why I was a lovely shade of chalk in all of the photos of me holding a cake in one hand, a fire extinguisher in the other, and a softball-sized growth on my internal organ).

Two years later, they took that patched up left ovary and left fallopian tube and finally diagnosed me with Stage IV endometriosis.

Eight years after that at the Cleveland Clinic, as everyone became at least .01% Irish in the streets below clutching their green beads and Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day, a sweet surgeon removed my right fallopian tube.

Finally, four years later they took my right ovary and my uterus, ending two decades of endometrial angst.

After each one of those surgeries, I felt a settling in of deep despair and grief. Louise Hay told me that my endo was “insecurity, disappointment, and frustration. Replacing self-love with sugar…” (something I did just last night, btw, from a box of Nutty Buddy bars I keep in the produce drawer of my fridge.) Hay’s affirmation for me? In part: “It’s wonderful to be a woman.” But…tell that to a woman with a pool of old, black blood in her belly, and bowels that are clutching to the walls of her pelvis with talons, and she might have something altogether different to say.

The grief I felt wasn’t necessarily because I wanted to have kids. Frankly, I was never sold on the idea. I’ve always been honest that I like kids on a case-by-case basis. I’ve never viewed all children as shining beacons of love and light like others I know. Some kids can be assholes.

Neither was I like many of my friends who seemed so sure they wanted to be mothers literally moments after they entered puberty. Like they were born to it.

Me?

I was more born to a truck with my dogs riding passenger side and The Cure blaring from my Pioneer speakers.

I don’t deny there is mother instinct in me though. Children crying in my vicinity “cuts me like a blue knife,” as Clarissa Pinkola Estés says in her Dangerous Old Woman series. And after it cuts me, I am able to discern pretty quickly when it’s a cry from not being resourced versus a cry from being spoiled rotten.

When it’s the former, I relate. After all, I once had a complete hanger-fueled come-apart on my ex-husband at Hot Dog on a Stick in the mall.

When it’s the latter, I willingly admit that my piercing gaze upon said child usually stops their wails cold as their tears freeze mid-cheek.

No.

The grief was more in line with a sense of the betrayal I felt from my own body. Not giving me choices. Not holding up her part of the bargain. What kind of woman could I be with no woman parts? I felt like an empty vessel. What could I possibly create from that state? And for a writer, to the depth of her soul, that’s a devastating question.

But here’s where it gets complicated. Though I do protest these days what I perceive as Louise Hay’s “causation” theory (especially as I witness so many of my dear friends right now who did all the right things: eating well, exercising, avoiding Nutty Buddy bars, doing their inner work, not suppressing their emotions, and still being diagnosed with cancer), and fall more in line with the Freudian/Jungian “correlation” between the physical and emotional, I do recognize that I didn’t exactly hold the feminine in high regard.

Do any of us?

Today?

I have a long, bloody history, no pun intended, of discounting my body.

And if I’m honest, maybe it’s a whole lot worse than simply discounting. It’s more like utter rejection in the way any real Gen-Xer worth their salt rejects things.

Wholly.

Without mercy.

And with no moderation.

Exhibit A

When I was twenty-two, I worked at a propane plant as an Office Manager. I had a gift for credit and collections, a perm, and a relationship with Aqua Net that made my hair exactly as tall as the Empire State building.

I’ll include the visual evidence because it goes on and on and on.

(Behold…the floppy drive I had just changed myself and my first hand-held computer.)

In addition to my managerial duties, I also filled propane tanks. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the bell lines that ran across the pavement to alert you to customers waiting to have their gas tanks filled. We had something similar. And I would snuff out my Virginia Slim Menthol Light, you know…safety, and all…and head out to manhandle a 100-pound tank.

When I would come back in, smelling of the odorant added to that invisible gas, my co-worker Bunny, a tall, sweet wisp of a woman (who seemed so old at the time but was likely around my age now) would admonish me for lifting all the heavy things and tell me it was going to affect my ability to have children.

Of course, I would scoff at her like we do all of our “elders” when we’re 22. But there was a truth that I wish I’d heard all those years ago. Honor your body. Don’t discount her. Her matter matters.

Instead, I was both punishing and proud of how far I could push my body physically. I could actually climb the rope to the top of the ceiling in gym class as a kid. I could run faster than anyone I knew. When someone asked me to help them move, I outworked everyone, proudly lifting things the guys would say were too heavy for me as they sat on the tailgate of the truck and watched me. I still do this at age 56, btw. I’ll move the hay myself, thank you very much. 65 pounds is nothing.

Exhibit B

In my thirties, as a bartender, I would twist and contort my body slinging drinks and beer. There were nights we raked in $13K+ with just four of us, and let me tell you something. At $2.50 for a beer and $5.00 for a well drink, that’s a lot of booze. I’d move so fast that I’d catch my toe under the cabinet to hold myself upright, while the top half of my body moved all but perpendicular in the other direction. The scars I have on my belly from pouring eight cherry bombs at a time into stacked glasses that shattered and the knee I cut on the metal well container probably both needed stitches, but I just poured myself another shot of Beam and kept going.

The night before Browns’ games, we’d work til three a.m., sometimes later, and have to be back at 9:00 a.m. for our twelve-hour shifts. Sometimes I would eat. But more often I’d drink my calories because there wasn’t time and then we’d all fall into our chairs at the local strip club at 11:00 p.m. for a steak because it was a “quiet” meal after a punishing day. I considered myself simply “lucky” to work at one of the hottest bars in Cleveland. But on my one day off per week, my body—quite literally—would. Not. Move. My calves were like beached orca whales, the balls of my feet felt like they’d just experienced stigmata, and tears would leak out of my eyes without my consent while I lay in bed watching back-to-back episodes of Sex and the City. I still feel a sense of breathlessness when I remember some of my dreams during this time. Specifically, the black wave that coursed across the bar top and obliterated everything in its path, including me.

Hashimoto’s and the removal of my thyroid didn’t stop me from mistreating my matter either.

Eventually something got my attention, but only because it was affecting my mind.

After my hysterectomy and subsequent fifty-pound weight gain, I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. 177 instances per hour where I would stop breathing and gasp awake.

It took months to diagnose, but before that happened, I experienced intense anxiety, and a sense that I was losing my mind. My partner at the time didn’t notice a thing, but my best friend did, in a hotel in D.C. the night before the Women’s March on Washington. She’s vowed never to share a room with me again, but she also saved my bacon because I went to the doctor and started CPAP therapy.

The body, the matter, it’s Kali. The Hindu Mother of creation and destruction. Maybe that’s why we’re so afraid of our bodies. It’s not just that they decay and none of us are getting out of here alive, but it’s that it’s so seemingly out of our control at times.

In my last Substack essay, I wrote something that’s still gnawing on me. “For thousands of years the masculine was what mattered. Spirit. Not matter. But what is matter? Mater. Mother. The feminine. The body that ages and decays. We have no value for it…”

Erich Neumann seemed to have had my back when he wrote of Kali in The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype “…clad in the nocturnal black of the earth goddesses and adorned with the hacked-off hands and heads of her victims, stands on the corpse of Shiva.” (p. 153) Shakti, Earth/Matter/Matr/Mother with her foot on the neck of Spirit. And behold this further ditty from Neumann, “For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction…” (p. 153) and “in the course of the later development of patriarchal values, ie., of the male deities of the sun and the light, the negative aspect of the Feminine was submerged. Today it is discernible only as a content of the primordial age, or of the unconscious.” (p. 155)

Until it’s not.

Kali had been placing her bare foot on my throat, her anklets jingling, as she cut off my breath—my spirit, from the Latin spiritus.

While I was unconscious.

And that brings me to the case of Lindsay Clancy. (A case I hadn’t even heard of until a friend of mine shared some of the details with me because I live under a rock, or in my case, in my barn with a pink pitchfork mucking stalls.) A few days after he’d told me, This Jungian Life did a podcast episode on “Lindsay Clancy & Maternal Infanticide: An Archetypal Perspective.” While I don’t know a lot about her case, it’s made me think, even harder, about the utterly short shrift we give to matter unless we’re beating it into submission, or feeding or starving it with calories, or pushing it, or telling it it’s not good enough. What really raised my hackles around Clancy’s case, though, was learning that she’d asked for help after pushing and pushing and pushing past what her body could carry. And still…it wasn’t enough.

This pressure we put on ourselves, and even on our own mothers, is insane. And everyone is sitting in their therapist’s offices, leaning back on handstitched pillows that read, “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.” Blaming. Shaming. Dissecting all the ways that she failed.

We expect our mothers to be perfect. We’re not satisfied with the “good enough” mothers. We have these collective images of mothers as holy. The Virgin Mary. All nourishing. Chicken soup, saltines, and snuggles.

My own inner mother is more Kali than Mary, though. We need both to be whole. But maybe that duality is what makes women so scary. It’s why we only want to see Mary. Because Kali is terrifying.

I saw the image of Kali, though I didn’t know it at the time, when I watched Moana and saw that mother mountain, the barren Te Kā. She was hardened, dried out, angry with an ire that was unfathomable, throwing balls of fire, so incensed that she rumbled the earth. I sobbed. I could feel the truth of it. The mother turned bitter in myself. And the irony wasn’t lost on me: this mountain of a rock woman was me and her dried out matter was not unlike the rheumatoid arthritis that makes my own bones brittle.

But here’s my question for you and for myself. How do we mother ourselves? How do we heed Kali’s bloody foot on our necks? And listen?

Because the truth is I’ve been mothering my whole life. Furry things. Four-leggeds. My cat Charlie Chan, who was the love of my life and trusted me so fiercely that she had her kittens on my pillow next to my head while I was sleeping. Even the raccoons who are now doing chores with me while I’m in the barn. I just never mothered myself. And that’s what Bunny was trying to do all those years ago.

I don’t have this all figured out. Tears still come unbidden after days of pushing myself too hard physically in my care for all the creatures I steward. I know how to mother matter. I just hadn’t considered that I matter.

“All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless.” ~ Zhuangzi

The farmers where I live collect huge piles of tumbleweeds and set them alight in spectacular blazes on mornings before the wind takes hold. Their thorns pop like bang snaps before they turn to ash and you’ve never seen anything go from existence to non-existence that quick. They’re fire hazards that way and in much of the West they are considered a noxious weed. Invasive. Not of here, having hitch-hiked to the U.S. with flax seeds during the 1870s.

I let them build up like a spiny fortress against my arena fence. Once in a while I dance with them before I set my horses loose in the arena. And by dance, I mean I kick them loose with my muck boot, hold them gingerly by their bases, then toss them to the fence line so my horses don’t have to tango with them as they run and buck and try to injure themselves on nothing whatsoever as horses are wont to do. Later, a baby jackrabbit shelters beneath them, hidden from the red-tailed hawk circling overhead.

In the spring, does heavy with fawns eat their young green shoots, before they turn barbed and bitter.

Few know of their value.

But my 93-year-old uncle knows. A lifelong rancher and the epitome of a cowboy to the very tip of his bolo tie. He tells me how he planted one year, before the snow came heavy. The tumbleweeds had blown in and laid down over his field like a blanket and his seedlings germinated and sheltered under them in the same way native seedlings still germinate under tumbleweeds today. Botanists call it a nurse plant.

His harvest thrived and his cattle got fat off the tumbleweeds, leaving his crop to grow. Turns out, tumbleweeds are full of protein.

Even fewer know how they helped to save the cattle industry when the Dust Bowl stripped the land bare, the wheat failed, and those useless tumbleweeds were harvested to create thistle hay. In Kansas alone, farmers harvested 350,000 tons in 1934 to feed their livestock. After wildfire, they’re the first thing holding the burned ground down, trapping moisture and feeding the soil they’re accused of ruining.

I marvel when they blow across my land, one of nature’s most inventive means for seed dispersal.

The overculture measures the tumbleweeds by ROI and finds none. But when the earth measures, she finds them invaluable.

I’m invasive too. Not of here. Born to pioneer women. A man-handed, three-titted (we’ll get to that) woman who dons a clean gray shirt each morn and looks like Pigpen by dusk.

I’ve lived my life like a tumbleweed. It must be my spirit plant. My roots have been so shallow at times that tough winds blew me across the country. I left a good marriage because my blood stopped coursing there and I traveled back east with thirty boxes of books and a twin mattress. I roll about collecting wisdom from every misstep I’ve ever made. It all lives inside of me, in my brittle arthritic bones that farmers might toss on the burn pile, too.

I blew back home a decade later, a few more boxes of books in tow, and settled in a valley below Dry Creek and, just like the tumbleweed, decided to offer cover for “useless animals.”

Each night before bed, I go out to check on one of my colonies of feral cats. Many were dumped out here “in the country.” Some seriously injured. Some as kittens left near a culvert on the side of the road. Scrawny little things, their eyes thick with sludge, cajoled with a can of prime filets into traps so they could be fixed and released back here on the sanctuary.

When I open the door one night, my cats are nowhere to be found and a raccoon waddles past before pausing to look back at me. We hold eye contact for a few minutes before she lumbers down my stairs. I can feel the silent agreement.

I see you.

And I see you. Her backside is twice the size of her front. It reminds me of my dowager’s hump.

“You’ll find refuge here. And water and Friskies.”

After all, we’re both trying to eke out our existence in this high desert drought. The air riddled with smoke from one of our many wildfires. We had no winter. The least amount of moisture measured since they began measuring one hundred and thirty-ish years ago. It’s so hot and dry, in fact, that my annuals came back. Little pansies poking up out of the dirt in scattered places shouting, “Mr. Bill, Mr. Bill” as they wave their little frond arms in the blow-dryer breeze.

Raccoons aren’t native either. Many call them invasive. But I imagine a bunch of burly men in their dusty Ropers bringing that raccoon’s ancestors here, against their will, because they were keen on training their coonhounds. Damned if those coons didn’t outsmart and outmaneuver both man and beast, and those masked critters—whose closest relative is the bear—downright thrived.

I do wonder how many will come.

Too many will come.

The Native Americans whose land I live on surely felt this way about my pioneer ancestors.

The night after our silent agreement, the raccoon brings her three babies. And the next night. And the next.

When I ask my neighbor about them, ever-so-slightly worried about the rabies everyone seems hellbent on warning me about, he says it’s illegal to trap and relocate them. They have to be “dispatched.”

The word “dispatch” lodges in my mouth, clogging my throat and choking me like the alginate dentists use to make teeth molds before it hardens.

By all measures of the “standard horse industry,” my horses would be called “useless.” Too old to “do a job” or “make me money.” After all, I can’t breed them, race them, or sell them. Rio, my palomino, was abused because the previous owner didn’t know he can’t see much but shadow behind either shoulder. Julio, named after Julio Iglesias, was set to take a trip to Mexico on a meat truck because he had severe laminitis. The vet gave me a 50/50 chance of reversal six years ago.

There’s no use for the useless. Around here, folks squeeze out the drops of a horse’s youth and marvel over their powerful flanks and when they see that it takes their horse just a few beats longer to get up after they’ve rolled, or they’re not as quick-moving on the trail with their cattle, or their back is starting to sway or their knees have a bit too much arthritis, they get rid of them. Most horses don’t get a sweet retirement. They’re replaced by the younger, the stronger, and the quicker.

And so it goes for roosters, too.

My rooster, Niles Cogburn Crane, was attacked by a dog when he was but a babe. In fact, “his” name was originally “Nelle.” That is, until he crowed. No one wants roosters. They don’t produce eggs. Where I live, folks set them “free” in fields to fend for themselves with no food or water. Once a year, our town has an “animal scramble” before the rodeo and kids chase after all manner of creatures and then a few days later toss them aside along with the paper cone from their cotton candy. If I had a tick for every time I’ve heard the phrase, “my animals have to have a job and earn their keep,” I’d have Lyme disease.

I go to the dermatologist and out of the blue he asks what I believe. We talk about the work of Carl Jung, of quantum physics and stardust, of shadow and light. He brings up a scripture about sons and sunrises. On the way to his office, I’d been grappling with a Hindu text about the senses that I’m torn over. But then, because there is a great Trickster always making ripples in the pond of my life, the doc tells me that the mole I asked him to check is actually a third tit. (My words, not his.)

“Excuse me?”

He leans against the med cabinet and folds his arms as he says, “It’s a mammary ridge. Also known as milk lines. They’re not uncommon, but people mistake them for moles.”

“What?”

But then a knowing. I’ve been caring for animals for so long that I’m becoming one of them. I of the animal body with a useless third tit. “Line those puppies up. Bring me all your ‘useless’ creatures. I’ll feed them.”

I once told my spiritual mentor that I didn’t want to be enlightened. I felt like an ignoramus saying such a thing to him of all people—this person I admire and aspire to. But I could feel some truth of it in my bones. And I think I understand now why I said it. In the world of spirit and matter, matter isn’t supposed to matter.

I get it. This dream is living me. Materialism is on its way out (for some), but what happens when the pendulum swings ALL. THE. WAY. to the other side?

Yet I wonder. Was I enlightened before I came here? And will I be enlightened after I go? But the in-between. The now:

I signed up for it on the dotted line.

I cashed the check.

I bought the farm. Literally and figuratively.

To feel the grief and crumple onto my horse, my sweet Leroy Boy, as he received a lethal injection because his coffin bones were growing through his soles. He was in too much pain to hold his 1,100 pounds on his dainty rope-bred feet. It was love, not loss, that wrung the grief from my eyes. My tears poured for three days, even in moments I wasn’t thinking about those last few minutes of his life.

And I think there’s something more. In the world of the spiritual, only spirit is supposed to matter. It reminds me how for thousands of years the masculine was what mattered. Spirit. Not matter. But what is matter? Mater. Mother. The feminine. The body that ages and decays. We have no value for it. Some think one day we can outsmart it. They’re sure as hell trying.

To ask me to transcend my senses is akin to asking me not to bury my face in Julio’s neck and breathe in Horse. My sister-in-law often tells me I stink like horse, and when she does, I sniff my own gray shirt just to smell it on me with its notes of Grandpa and its hints of grit. I’d bottle it, if I could.

I write down the word entanglement on a piece of paper, and a tiny spider skitters across the page. It crawls down into the bottom of the three rings and disappears. I write the word entanglement again and he skitters back across the page.

It’s glorious to live in this mundane and mystical world full of matter. To feel the pressure from Rio’s flared nostril, to smell the peonies bending with their giant pink blossoms, to hear the rain pattering on the barn roof as I muck the stalls. I “see” God the day I question her existence in the deer picking its way through the tumbleweeds in my back field. She reminds me, “gently, gently, gently.”

I might still say that I don’t seek enlightenment so much as I seek to lie on the warm belly of earth. I measure that warmth, feeling the pebbles grind against the back of my head, and hear the aspens clattering overhead like thin wooden bells. I’d mortgage my soul to buy the farm, again and again and again.

I received a rape threat recently. Right after I posted my second article on Substack and syndicated it to Goodreads.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. That my piece Burn the Whale Down was low-key about silencing women and here was someone trying to silence me.

Granted, they were hiding out behind their AnonymousMail in a pair of shit-stained boxers scratching at their back pimples with a set of kitchen tongs, but still…

My mind knew it wasn’t real with its all caps and “DO NOT SHOW UP AGAIN ONLINE WITHOUT PAYING MY BOSSES FIRST. I HAVE YOUR ADDRESS!” language.

I’ll tell you what though…My animal body didn’t know it wasn’t real.

At all.

That “R” word lives in the marrow of women’s bones, and it rides on our shallow inhales and exhales like a plastic grocery bag in a riptide.

But, the whole experience reminded me that there are more insidious forms of silencing.

The Polite Kind

My past few Substack posts marked a reemergence into the public writing world for me. While I’d worked studiously on revisions of my first novel, and wrote the first draft of my second novel, it was all safely underground and locked up in password-protected documents.

Instead of putting my own words out into the world, I worked writing-adjacent because I couldn’t abandon it completely. But for nine years, I didn’t write publicly.

Not since my MFA where I found that I didn’t much care for the writer’s world and didn’t particularly want to belong to it or play its games.

I’d had inklings of this during my undergrad when my creative writing professor had offered a critique of sixty pages of my novel and said I could pick it up on the first day of Spring Semester. I waited next to his door on that cold checkered floor every Wednesday during office hours.

For eight weeks.

I skipped lunches and ate strawberry Pop-Tarts propped up against the brick wall, burping up my angst for feedback that never came.

But by the time I signed on to pay upwards of $100K for that next level of shiny, published professionals in grad school, I knew this time…it would be different. I would pack my brand-spanking-new binder full of empty college-ruled notebook paper and write down every single word of brilliance from the experts with my Cross rollerball.

I would capture it all.

And I would finally belong to this society of “artists” and “literary folk.”

What I didn’t allow myself to fathom was that this society was a world full of literary criticism, a deep fawning over the Iowa Writers Workshop (my own included), devastating critiques from students who read Faust once, and a whole lot of ego (mine always sitting front row with her spectacles, btw.)

It was of my own doing. And I own that. But I also know I’m not alone. If I had a dollar for every writer I know who hasn’t written a solitary word since their MFA, I’d be rescuing more horses, hiring barn help, and expanding my sanctuary.

Waiting for Evisceration

I remember where I was sitting in 2017 when I received the email from my mentor that my MFA thesis passed.

Barely.

I’d just finished watching The Last Jedi with my brother and as we walked out of the theatre I happened to open my email, and I sat down on a cement bench and sobbed until my guts—full of undigested buttered popcorn and half-chewed milk-duds—all but fell onto the pavement.

I’ve experienced abuse in my life, both emotional and physical, along with incessant criticism. (Like when I brought home all A’s and one B in fourth grade and my step-father pulled out the vinyl from The Wizard of Oz and played “If I Only Had a Brain” before I headed off to school each morn. My own asshole inner critic often takes on his voice.)

I’m intimately acquainted with rejection, as well.

But I’ll tell you this. Nothing has felt more eviscerating in my life than someone telling me that my writing, this lantern that lives in the cave of my heart, wasn’t good enough, bright enough, or enough. Period.

It wasn’t just that my art baby, this thing I gestated and opened my veins and bled for, was ugly, it was that my very ideas weren’t sound. That the unconscious material that was trying to bubble up to the surface and land on the page wasn’t enough either.

My whole second year’s experience was one blow after another to my artist’s ego. My mentor for my first year had given me the green light on my thesis novel. I was then switched to a new advisor who told me I needed to rewrite the whole she-bang, in one year, because it simply wasn’t believable to have men and women at war and that women would never give up their rights in this country.

Oh, how I’d love to have had a conversation with her when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Or as I scroll through Instagram and watch hordes of women denouncing relationships with men and choosing bears over the masculine.

After much Resistance, I did as my second mentor told me, and went on to write a new novel, from scratch, about a girl who longs to weave the story that shapes her world. Unfortunately, her country is ruled by a narcissistic dictator whose mouthpiece is a rooster who crows the dictator’s propaganda to the citizens each morning. He insists that it’s perfectly sunny when it’s raining outside and that he is the only Story Weaver and anyone else who tries to change the narrative will be put to death. (By the way, I wrote this book in 2016, but I’ll get into prophetic writing in another essay.)

Both mentors read this newly revised thesis. My first one sang some praise, gave me constructive criticism on how to make it better, and passed me. The second-year mentor gave me the “barely” news as if she were AI reading the stock prices through a hollowed out tin cup.

Her feedback was polite, for sure, but it lodged in my throat like a 12-foot splinter.

The Log of Wood

Not too long after my MFA, I signed up to attend a writer’s workshop in Cape Cod and showed up with my thesis crinkled in my sweaty, desperate hands. I sat next to an agent whom I considered to be the most glitterati of the literati. I had followed her for years and thought she was the most brilliant agent on the planet so when suppertime rolled around, I sat right next to her just to bask in her shade.

I had barely buttered my dinner roll when she said, “I hope we don’t see a bunch of overly polished MFA theses.” Or some such. Were I still drinking at the time I would have slammed five glasses of pinot noir on the spot. (And I don’t like wine unless it’s glazing my roast beast.)

The next day, I was so frozen during her critique session I don’t even remember what she said.

Do you know of any other artists, aside from writers, who get a ten-page chance to prove themselves worthy?

Imagine a painter paying thousands of dollars to cover their painting with a tarp. When they arrive in the room with the critics, they’re allowed to pull down just two inches of the upper-right hand corner of the tarp to show their artwork and say, “Hey, what do you think?”

It’s insanity.

“The Dark Side”

And I’ve willingly participated in both sides of the insanity with folks paying me to critique their writing, to “rip it apart,” to tell them what’s not working. And my writing-lovin’, Virgo stellium, OCD-ish self was happy to remain in that world of words.

I once shared my angst with a client over critiquing people’s art given my own devastating experiences. He denied that he had felt devastated by me. But… he did always hold on to something I shared with him that I heard from Mike Robbins years ago.

The first thing your mind says when you receive feedback is “Fuck you.”

And I have dozens of clients who had carte blanche permission to say just that, “Fuck you, Melanie.”

And they did.

Out loud.

When they got past, “Fuck you, Melanie.” They landed in “I suck” territory. And that does feel devastating.

But it passes, and then they move on to the next phase, “Wait. What was that?” And that’s where the magic of revision can happen.

But there is an art to feedback and criticism that doesn’t cripple an artist. I hope to hell I’ve been on the “right side” of that line. Maybe sometimes I haven’t.

“Jung on Art”

But I didn’t know what I didn’t know during those years.

I wish I’d had these words Jung wrote in 1929: “Although my patients occasionally produce artistically beautiful things…I nevertheless treat them as completely worthless when judged by the canons of real art. As a matter of fact, it is essential that they should be considered worthless, otherwise my patients might imagine themselves to be artists, and the whole point of the exercise would be missed. It is not a question of art at all – or, rather, it should not be a question of art – but of something more and other than mere art, namely the living effect upon the patient himself….A patient needs only to have seen once or twice how much he is freed from a wretched state of mind by working at a symbolical picture, and he will always turn to this means of release whenever things go badly with him.” —Jung on Art: The Autonomy of the Creative Drive by Tjeu van den Berk

I feel that freedom from the wretched every time I sit down with Louis—a gnat in my weird western novel whose soul gets separated from its body which is stuck to the spur of a low-down cowboy named Tucker.

I also deeply wish I’d understood that my soul was speaking to me in both of my thesis novels. My exploration of my first rejected thesis was really about the war between the masculine and feminine within myself. My second? A grappling with the mother complex.

I would have known that fitting in, adapting, and making art that is “worthwhile” to the “society of artists” isn’t the point at all. My job as an artist isn’t to serve the ego, it’s to allow my soul full expression, to allow my voice, my stories, my complexes, and my Self to emerge.

I live happily outside the society of artists these days. I know that these words from the Gospel of Thomas are true for me: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Because not creating feels like it blocks my airways.

Creating is a path to the Self—to know thy Self. There is no craft book, no course on How to Write Your Book in 9 Seconds, no bachelor’s or master’s program, no artificial intelligence that can work out your autonomous complexes, that can allow your psyche to speak to you except applying your own ass to your chair and letting it speak.

Some of the most powerful words Jung ever spoke in regard to art were these in 1930: “it is not Goethe that creates Faust, but Faust that creates Goethe. And what is Faust? Faust is essentially a symbol…any work of art is a symbol that has crossed the threshold of consciousness.”

When my ego rears up, which it still does, and imagines hitting the Times list, I remind myself not to be so riddled with attachment over the future of my art baby. Of course, I may want it to go to Yale and then to Oxford. To become a lawyer or a doctor. But my baby may want to work at Arby’s and that’s perfectly noble too.

I have no idea what will happen to my art. For it is art.

Art for Art’s Sake

I feel it in my marrow now. Rape threats, or no. Mentors be “damned.” I create art for art’s sake. It’s not perfect. It’s full of run-on sentences and purple prose, at times.

Creation is my business.

Where and how it lands, that is not my business.

P.S. If you are threatened online, you can report it. I did. Both to my Sheriff’s office for the paper trail, and online at https://www.ic3.gov/

“It’s so interesting what happens when women get older. We carry this wisdom, but no one cares. And we’ve survived the death cult of capitalism but, really, you just want us to get out of the way, don’t you? You want us to be silent. Quiet as the grave.” ~ Martha Ellison, The Morning Show

Fuck that.

That quiet grave?

It’s the belly of the whale on the hero’s journey that wasn’t necessarily culled from the monomyth with women in mind. And in midlife many of us are camped out in that belly, right next to the whale’s colon. We’re rubbing our hands in front of a dwindling fire, amongst the bones of our predecessors— women full of wisdom, wrinkles and wit—while we unpluck the weaving of our wild natures and disavow the wise women we are to become.

And society would prefer that we stay right there. It doesn’t matter that we heeded all the calls. It doesn’t matter that we slayed so many dragons to get to where we are now. It doesn’t matter that we returned with boon after boon after boon. You know, the ones we were told mattered. We followed the script of the patriarchy and that “death cult of capitalism” only to become invisible to everyone around us. Literally. Do you know how many women in midlife have uttered those words to me? “I walk through the grocery store and it’s as if I don’t exist.”

I think about my own life and how I popped a needle in my arm that contained that whole masculine structure. Remnants of it still run in my veins.

Following the Man’s Map & Refusing to Ask for Directions

I pushed so damned hard as I played the game, climbing the corporate ladder after I’d tried to refuse the call from the Area VP. Eventually he wore me down, and I accepted and donned my armor.

It was the early nineties, ladies. I wore khakis, a blazer with shoulder pads, and…I kid you not…maroon loafers with a damned tassel. I was about a buck ten weight-wise and looked like a sad linebacker, slapping on the Clinique cosmetics and putting Band-Aids over my tattoo so I wouldn’t offend anyone.

My sword was my willingness to work harder than everyone else around me. I was twenty-four and worked twelve…fourteen hours days during mergers and acquisitions and I managed 167 district offices. I slept in hotels in Parker, Arizona next to the railroad tracks and called the “front desk” to ask for a bar for my window when someone knocked on said window.

I ate homemade tortillas and red chili in Los Lunas, New Mexico brought to me at 8:30 pm by a sweet, sweet woman whose company we’d just purchased, and I ate while manually importing their thousands of customer’s worth of data.

Unfortunately, at that time, I was too young to know how to shut off my emotions—a requisite for this overly adapted, skewed-up version of the hero’s journey at play today. And I was fired for it. We had purchased a large outfit in Nowhere, Nevada and my colleagues and I met up at the previous owner’s home for cocktail hour before we headed to a steakhouse to dine and swallow bullshit. I walked into this man’s home and felt exactly like Jim Carrey of Ace Ventura fame when he strolled into that “lovely room of death”.

There were dead, mounted animals. Every. Where. There were swans, and zebras, and cougars, and tigers, and bears, Oh, fucking, my. There were delicate white and brown cranes propped up on their spindly legs. There were tiny black squirrels sitting on their haunches, their tiny paws reaching mid-air for salvation. I couldn’t say a word. I stood there; disgusted; flabbergasted; wanting to hurl and curl up in a ball of crying mass. Apparently, I didn’t need words because, “Melanie, you didn’t have to say anything. Everyone knew exactly what you were thinking. It was offensive.”

That was my last corporate job, but it didn’t stop me from continuing to embark on more and more harrowing journeys. These ones involved trying to fit into the world of the “literati” who’ve read Faust once. A bachelors. An MFA. Craft book after craft book. (I read every one.) And…oh…the writer’s workshops. The pain of all those false boons and dollars still feels like a raw hemorrhoid after a long spell on cold cement.

Oh, my loves…the boon isn’t out there.

We’re heroines, not heroes. We’re fiercer. We’re braver. We’re Sally Field in Steel Magnolias. Maureen Murdock named The Heroine’s Journey decades ago and not many folks listened. Which just furthers my point.

And our boon, and I hope I can say this with enough certainty, our boon doesn’t look like something “out there.” It looks like something “in here.” The things we’ve disowned in ourselves. The reconciliation with the feminine that values being over doing, receptivity over pushing, and embodiment in a body that doesn’t feel like it has to squeeze into our Lululemons.

Without the real boon—that coming back to our Selves—our descent was just tourism.

This is what I know. No one is coming to save us. They’re not going to unroll the ladder down through that whale’s esophagus and muck through multiple stomachs to get to that colon where we reside, are they?

You know, we do need the hero’s journey in the sense of the life force energy to get ourselves up on outta there. But it’s going to look different through the Heroine’s Journey lens.

And what we become when we’ve integrated? Artists. Elders. Storytellers. Creatives. Embodied beings who’ve healed from their burnout—no longer willing to embark on a journey not made for them—emotion-wise beings who’ve brought their heretics home—all those exiled, disavowed, still-wild bits of themselves within, and ripened beings who burned the whale down.

Dear PETA. No whales were harmed in the writing of this article. It’s a metaphor.

The “truths” they’re selling about midlife are bald-faced lies.

But…I’ll admit that I used to buy into every single one of them.

They said midlife was about hot flashes.

And holy hell, no pun intended, I’ve been there. Sitting with my pup chawing on Big Hunks when a sudden warmth creeps through my torso, turning hotter and hotter until I’m gasping from lack of oxygen and afraid to open my mouth to let in any cool air because I’ve watched Backdraft about a million times, so I know better.

They said it was about night sweats.

I’ve woken up with my yellow Dr. Seuss “One Fish, Two Fish” pajamas melded to my body like molten gold. Lying there panting while my aforementioned pup tried to lick the sweat from inside my mouth. It was all very Animal Farm meets Suzanne Somers without her yams in the Mojave Desert in August.

They said it was about mood swings.

I’ve sobbed uncontrollably while watching Call the Midwife even though I chose not to have children. Those emotions trying to knock. me. the f—out. And en route to sticking my head in the fridge for hot flash relief, leaving the remote control next to my beloved oat milk and raging for two hours while I searched for it.

I bought into all of it because that’s what society said I should buy. Along with Botox for the grooves on my forehead and the Lululemons for the body I’m supposed to want back. The supple one who gave too much and pushed through the exhaustion with “yes, of course” instead of “actually, no.” Apparently, there’s no use for the body I have now that’s whittled and scarred and aging.

A multi-billion-dollar industry built around selling us the lie that midlife is something to manage, minimize, or medicate.

But I’m no longer buying.

My pocketbook is empty for that kind of nonsense, but sadly it took a whole lot of loss— My father. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Friends. Pups. A beloved horse. And, my brother, just five years older than me, who fell into his own campfire.

As utterly devastating as that loss was, after the grief settled, I realized there were things I needed to burn, too. The idea that life goes on forever and there’s all the time in the world to do what I’ve always felt called to do. The notion that collecting all the shiny accolades would somehow make me feel worthy, finally. The fallacy that somehow what matters more is my appearance and not my soul.

Here’s what I’m buying these days.

Those hot flashes? They were the fire reigniting in my core. A reminder of what I’ve left undone as I spent the first half of my life building my career, giving everything to everyone at the expense of myself, and raising others up to show their brilliant light while I covered my own shine with a dusty old tarp that smelled faintly of cat piss. I needed that fire.

The emotions? Pure, unadulterated fuel and goldmines of information. Rage? My rickety boundaries have been crossed. Strengthen them. Say “no”…or say “yes” to myself. Grief? There’s something more I’m longing for that I’ve buried. Anxiety? Unused energy lying in wait for me to finally declare, it’s time.

Them sleepless nights, which usually involved the 3am wake-up and rumination around, is this it? Stark reminders. Wake up. Don’t fall asleep again. You have work to do.

I know this with pure certainty: midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s a threshold.

Midlife isn’t asking you for management, minimization, or medication (though, I slap a patch on my ass once a week. No judgment.) Rather, it’s asking something more of you.

And if you can feel that, even a little, you’re already standing at the edge of it.

Grab your peacoat and galoshes and let’s cross it together.