Time, Anxiety, Caffeine and Making Space

May 3, 2012 By michaboyett 36 Comments

http://www.flickr.com/photos/estetiskaa/ via Pinterest

 

I’ve been living on caffeine. I’m talking two cups of coffee in the morning, a shot of espresso to get me through the afternoon and a nighttime cup so I can write till midnight.

I’m not saying this to brag or to complain. I’m saying it’s not healthy. I’m not healthy.

There’s this thing I’ve learned about myself: I have a terrible pattern in my life. Left to my own devices, my ENFP brain and I would do something different every day. I would wake at whatever time felt right. I would run into friends on my walk to the not-very-important-meeting and let them convince me we should play hooky all morning and sit at the park. And I would be enormously happy. Until nighttime. Then I would cry that I’d done nothing with my day and all I want is to accomplish something important with my life. I would cry that I just want a schedule and someone to help me.

Thankfully, life has forced me to not be left to my own devices. For instance, I once had a job (more than one! outside of the home! shocker!) and I set an alarm and I got dressed at a reasonable hour and went to important meetings on time.

Then, I had kids. And I didn’t need to set an alarm anymore. They forced me into a schedule no matter how hard my personality fought it. Kids were good for my sanity. (I mean that in the most literal of ways.)

My point is that I need organization. I need help to manage time. And if I let that intentionality slide from my life, I find myself emotionally spent. It doesn’t take long.

Last fall I began some really great habits. I started running. I started simplifying my life in terms of relationships and food and possessions. I had the opportunity to hire a babysitter for a few hours a week so I could work hard when it was time to write (as opposed to letting my kids zombie-stare at the TV for thirty more minutes so I could finish a post). I felt like I was learning and growing and living refreshed.

But here’s the thing: I ran less and less during February, and even less during March. And by April, it barely felt like it mattered. I’d convinced myself that I didn’t really need it. Who knew? I guess it hadn’t been doing anything for me after all.

The past two weeks I’ve been staying up till midnight or one and getting up at six, all in the name of writing more. I’ve got so much going on in my head! I have deadlines! So I’ve been drinking coffee and needing more coffee and sleeping less and not exercising. And (again, this is a shocker), I’ve been more anxious.

Chris was married to Panic Attack Micha for a long time. Grateful, Surrendered Micha has been a newer thing around here. And though I’ve always known that my spiritual life must be pursued intentionally, I hadn’t realized how much it is wrapped up in the health of my physical, relational, emotional life. I’ve been a tearful mess this week.

I talk about creating sacred space and I know that space has to be fought for. Every thing around me is willing to sneak that space away. And, at least for me, every need seems legitimate. Last night, after coming home at 10:30 from the co-op preschool meeting and stomping around the house in a humph and then near-hyperventilating while trying to convince Chris how hard my life is, I had a moment of insight: I am fearing time the same way I was before I began this journey with the Benedictines. These past two weeks I have been living stretched and ungrateful; I’ve missed out on the joy of wholeheartedness.

I probably should have figured that out sooner (what with all the contemplative posts I’ve been churning out!) but it takes space to see yourself, right? I needed to have a good cry in the kitchen while I should have been writing to take a look at what’s been missing in my spirit. And what’s been missing is the willingness to pay attention, the joy of being grateful, the goodness of seeing time as a friend and not my enemy.

I know I don’t want to be some online persona who spews wisdom around here and then misses it in her own life. I want to be kind. I want to live out the grace of Jesus.

But we can’t live out the grace of Jesus if we’re not constantly reminded of how much we need that grace. I can’t tell you how important it is to make space in your heart for God to speak and not recognize how little space I’ve made in my own heart.

So, yesterday morning, I woke up with my early rising baby, who nursed then jumped from my lap at 6:30 and started dancing to music in his own head in the dawn-gray light of his room. And I let my husband sleep a little late. He needed it, what with having to stay up late consoling me and helping me fix my organizational disaster of a mind. I pulled out my morning prayer book, but mostly Brooksie moved around me, trying to climb into my lap on the couch, falling and bonking his chin on the coffee table, losing his ball under the bookshelf. And then at 7:15, the rest of our world woke: August entered the living room with sleepy eyes and his blanket held tight. He sleep-stumbled straight into my lap and I scooped him up and sniffed his hair for as long as I could before Brooksie wedged his way in. Then the three of us scooted into the bedroom and woke Chris with snuggles and baby wrestling.

You know what I did? I put on my running clothes and told my husband I’d be back soon. I walked past an orange tabby cat pouncing the birds and hopping away satisfied at the play of it. I looked hard at the lady and her two dogs. I sighed at the weight of the air and goodness of the breeze. And I listened to music. I listened to Lori Chaffer‘s voice on Waterdeep’s newest album and I ran to the beat of “Call it a Dance.” She was singing:

We can change
It’s not like we can’t pick our feet up off the floor
It takes a certain kind of brave
To believe you can leave the road you’ve always walked before
We can face
Ourselves in the mirror we can look real hard
At all those things that are not nice

When you move to the left, move to the right
Call it dance and your feet feel light
Carry that weight, hold your head up high
Cause you move to the left, move to the right
In the middle of the day, in the middle of the night
Don’t be afraid, it’s never too late to try

Sometimes the gray clouds are low but they’re shading the burn of the sun. Sometimes what feels sharp in the wind is really a soft breeze when you lean into it. My anxiety is always selfish. It is always fearful and gratitude does not coexist with fear.

I ran in my usual awkward-asthmatic pace. But as soon as my heart said “Hello Lord,” the world opened up and I remembered: I can live in the prison of my mind or I can gasp at the wide-open world. I can fear the lists and the crushing clock cutting into the few hours I’ve been given in this day-long spin of the earth, or I stare into the opening of the day and say: These hours are enough because God has given them and God is enough.

Sometimes life bears down with the weight of a hundred suns
And then you find that the strain of carrying everything is never done
Funny thing but you know when you go to the edge of what you can bear
You have a strength and you know why…

 


Filed Under: the Praying Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , 36 Comments

{Practicing Benedict} Work and Prayer and Rest

March 7, 2012 By michaboyett 5 Comments

“Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore all the community must be occupied at definite times in manual labour and at other times in lectio divina.” (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 48)

One of the things that makes St. Benedict’s Rule so significant in the canon of ancient Christian writings, is that he had an unusual sense of balance and gentleness. He wrote at a time (7th century) when many believers were burdening themselves under a weight of self-induced abuse (as a way of worshipping and feeling Christ’s pain) and were choosing to sacrifice community for the sake of enlightenment (a lifestyle that Benedict saw as unhealthy and unbiblical). He wrote against the life of the hermit. He wrote with a practical understanding of holistic worship. He understood that our bodies need care as much as our souls need nourishing. And he wrote with grace offered.

What I loved about the small amount of time I’ve spent at monasteries was the opportunity to see monks in their daily living. Yes, there was the liturgy of the hours and the eating and the time alone for prayer. But there was also the morning work because somebody has to fix the stopped-up toilet and somebody has to make a living around there. At St. Andrews in Valleyrmo, there was a ceramics shop and several monks worked daily crafting and creating. At the monastery in Pecos, New Mexico, a nun was well known for her weaving. It was her work. She wove and she sold it and she prayed.

We often define ourselves by separate categories. We are spiritual and physical and emotional and relational. And those layers are not separated into tidy sections. The spiritual is shaped by the physical. The relational forms the emotional. To care for another, to offer water to a thirsty child, is to worship.

So, yes to St. Benedict and his simple message: “Idleness is the enemy of the soul.” We pray and we work. We study scripture because in it we find the word of life, and then we live and engage and serve.

Don’t be mistaken. There is a difference between idleness and rest. There’s a difference between blind striving and hard work. How do we know where one stops and the other begins? We know who we are in Christ. We believe in grace and in God’s deep love for us. We work out of a healthy knowledge of our own value because we know it is not a result of our accomplishments. We work knowing that our hope is in the one who offers rest at the end of the day, at the end of the week.

Work and prayer. Work and prayer. Always knowing who gives work, who calls us to work, who equips us for work, who brings the day to a close and calls us back to the candle burning in the window of the stone chapel, where the monks chant the Psalms…

Return to your rest, my soul,
for the Lord has been good to you.

Psalm 116:7

Filed Under: the Praying Life Tagged With: , , , , 5 Comments

Poem-a-Day Friday: Sarah C. Harwell

March 2, 2012 By michaboyett 3 Comments

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I haven’t been reading my poem-a-day this week. But I’ve been thinking about a poem by my friend Sarah Harwell. She wrote this poem back when we studied together at Syracuse. When I first read it, I loved it. But it hasn’t been until now, years later, where I’ve come to understand the ritual and struggle of begging a child into sleep: the pushing toward and holding on all at once.

The past three nights in my parents’ house have been ridiculous attempts at swaying my son to close his eyes. “But Mom! I sleep with my eyes open!” It hasn’t been pretty. And so, I hear this poem in my head while I sit on the edge of his bed, pushing him toward the sleep realm, listening to his whining, telling him one more story…

(“Dead” was first published in Poetry magazine and then in a collection of poems called “Three New Poets,” which featured Sarah, along with two other genius poet-friends of mine, Courtney Queeney and Farah Marklevits. I love all three of them. The book is worth picking up. Read Mary Karr’s recommendation of this poem for a Washington Post series here.)

Dead

for Hannah

The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold

one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.
Every night she fights this silent way of being
with all the whining ammunition that she has.

She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small
and willful links to life that carry her away.
Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades

with her stuffed animals. When she wakes,
the sad circles disappeared, she blinks
before she knows me. I have listened

to one million breaths of her. And every night
my body seizes when she leaves to go
where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.

Sarah C. Harwell

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: , 3 Comments

Sweet Monday Morning Goodness

February 13, 2012 By Micha Boyett Hohorst 15 Comments

I read this words in bed yesterday morning, in my Christmas pajama pants (yes, I’m still wearing them). And I lifted my face up to the blank white ceiling and half prayed/ half sighed “Yes, Yes, Yes.” Oh, these words, friends. I pray they are just what you need to hear today as well…

“If I am appreciated for what I do, what I achieve, I am not in fact unique since someone else can do the same, and probably do it better than I. When my estimation and value of myself depends on what I can produce with my hands or with my mind, then in Henri Nouwen’s words I have allowed myself to be ‘a victim of the fear tactics of the world’. This is the self that so often leads me into activity to prove my value. But if productivity becomes my main way of overcoming self-doubt I lay myself open to rejection and criticism, and so to inner anxiety or depression. I am constantly checking myself and my achievements. So my productivity really only reveals how much I am driven by fear of not being up to standard and by an insatiable desire to justify myself. It is only when I am loved not for I do but for who I am that I can become myself, unique and irreplaceable.”

-Esther de Waal, Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality

Filed Under: Beautiful Tagged With: , , , , 15 Comments
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