I’ve been so focused on external goals lately—I finished my MFA in creative writing in December—that care for my body has been neglected. And so now it’s January, and I have a winter fluff about me. I don’t mind the extra weight so much as the stiffness of my joints, the slug of my movements, and the overall heavy feel I have with all my thoughts and actions. I operate better 10 pounds lighter, and my heart is lighter too.

This is the best time to practice self-love, though. I know that I will soon have lost the unneeded layers of mass, but in the meantime, I wiggle and bless them up. I prefer to see it as a transition time—a moment for me to reexamine the things I carry, and a chance to empty my load of unnecessary items.

I have a few burdens that I need to set down, things that are not meant for me, emotions I choose not to pack in my suitcase. The extra weight is patterns, rules and expectations that I did not consciously know I allowed into my knapsack on this life journey.

But I prefer to pack light both emotionally and physically, both metaphorically and literally, as for an airplane trip. That way, I don’t have to wait for other people to deliver (or carry) all my baggage, I don’t have to ask other people to do the lifting, moving and sorting—I can do it all myself. It requires me to live a simple life. Carrying little to no baggage keeps me independent, and the experience flexible. When I carry little, it makes me fly higher, longer and further. It doesn’t take as much energy.

I have seen so many doves lately; on a piano, in nature, on a poster across the street, and even Dove Valley Rd. was on a road sign we went under last night, that I have had to explore what that means to me. Doves are symbols of peace and serenity, signaling transitions in existing relationships that have rough spots in them, which is all appropriate for me right now. I like to think that the closer I get to internal peace, the lighter my body and heart will become, and the higher I will be able to fly. I’ll become whiter, purer, and more in line with the spirituality I seek. I can rise above the sullenness of a reluctant body.

“Mother and Child” by Mary Cassatt

My dad texted last night to say that Mom was in the Emergency Room. It was her gall bladder, the doctors didn’t know why it hurt, but “they’ll be home soon.” This is typical of my parents. Every piece of bad news is glossed over with something meant to be comforting.

This is the fourth time in four months that my 74-year-old mom has been in the ER. Gall Bladder Sludge, Urinary Tract Infection, Ovarian Cysts…the tally of her ailments runs like an extra-long receipt at the grocery store—and the price is even higher.

My sister and I pay attention to the sum total of these transactions and try to see what the larger bill might become. “Something’s wrong” my sister constantly says. What’s wrong is that my mother is getting old. She may die soon, she may rally and die later, but what’s certain is that—like all humans—she will certainly die someday. And to fathom the meaning of a mother’s death seems to me a Great Mystery of human existence, a paradox of importance.

Mothers are life-givers. Mothers are the source. While my father obviously contributed to my conception, my mother was the carrier, the womb, the chalice. She was the fertile cave that sheltered my first fragile life. She nurtured me within the innermost reaches of her body and I was privy to all her secret recesses. I fed at the deepest, most important spring of life that she could offer. I exist because of my mother.

And now my mother’s poor health teases death into my consciousness. The possibility of death, however slight, makes me want to have full presence and cognizance of her life now, while it’s available.

That sounds like a great plan. And then I remember that my mum and I haven’t been on the best of terms lately. My mother is upset with me for not believing the way she does, and I have been speaking more openly about my own belief system. I don’t want to sweep our differences under the rug; I want to be heard and loved despite our differences.

I love my mother unequivocally and that love is returned. But still, there is an estrangement of the heart. The one thing my mom wants is the one thing that I cannot give her. For me to say “I believe” in her God and her religion would be my mother’s ultimate wish. Until then, I sense she holds me at arm’s length, using her religion as a barrier to true connection and true sharing. It seems like my mother can’t let me into her innermost chambers of her heart until I agree that her belief system is correct, that she has dedicated her whole life rightly, and that I recommit to it.

But I can’t do this, even for her. If I were allowed to talk freely, without harsh words or tears from her in return, I would tell her that I don’t believe there is only one way; I believe that there are many paths to the same goal. I learned individuality, independence, self-reflection and all sorts of inner secrets from her and her life force. I learned to be a strong woman. I learned to think for myself and to be true to myself.

The gestures that resonate most from the total experience of my childhood are a head held high above my shoulders and a hair flip of my horse-like mane. Physical expressions that were indifferent to public opinion and valued personal freedom were what she taught me. These are the ways my body remembers my mother’s example. I am a proud woman with a beautiful, sexual and rich life force, things she wanted for me that perhaps she couldn’t find for herself.

If there is any mystery equal to my mother’s God, it is the mystery of a mother’s Love. My mother has been responsible for creation of life, for the three of her children. This is the closest we humans can come to pure miracle. Perhaps the God Wall between my mom and I has no priority over the bond our bodies have already forged in the crucible of her womb. Perhaps I’ve always had and always will have access to her and her heart—it’s the privilege that comes from being born of her.

I test this theory out in yoga today. I close my eyes and set an intention to send my mother healing thoughts throughout my practice. In my inner world, it is easy to find her and her heart immediately, recognizable by the same feeling I get when she hugs me and calls me “Lizzy.” She’s not even very far; she is inside my own heart, beats in the same rhythm, courses the same bloodlines. To love my mother is to love myself. There is no wall between us after all; only the heart valve that opens and shuts to prevent us from flowing backwards.

“You write because you turn sadness into funny,” said the dream gods last night.

Thank you. Thank you for that. I had gotten so PMS-y that I had turned into the worst kind of negative blockage—the blasé blockage. “I just don’t want to do anything, I don’t care about anything,” says the voice of apathy. That voice is the most dreadful creeper of slime I’ve yet encountered. If I’m furious and mad, I can rebel. If I’m distraught and in pain, I can rally from the passion of it all. But anytime I feel as though “I don’t care,” I know that I’ve put too much distance between me and my source; I’ve swaddled myself in too many layers of cotton to be able to thrash about freely. Apathy is when I’ve anesthesized myself, but looked away from all of the needles.

I would rather swoon from the sight of my deadening. Or perhaps not become numb in the first place: Isn’t it better to hydrate on one’s tears than to be dry…and thirsty? To take it further, isn’t it better to have an open heart that could occasionally get hurt than a closed one that grows smaller through disuse?

They say that like attracts like. If we are able to feel the depths of despair or sadness, then we are also building in ourselves the capacity for light and love—and the two measures are alike in their closeness to the heart. When I wall off those feelings of inadequacy, or don’t look at them and deal with them directly, I am also cultivating indifference to joy. When I was pregnant, in Lamaze class, we practiced dealing with pain by holding an ice cube. I was told to ignore the bite of that pain, become uninterested and unresponsive to that freezing burn. To me, this was impossible. Instead, I much preferred to dive down deep into the experience, to welcome the pain and let it wash over me. During labor, I rode the waves of my contractions, breathed down into their very core and found the bottom. Then I pushed up off the sandy floor and rose through to emerge on the other side.

Pain has depth. Pain has numinosity—it arouses spiritual emotion and is awe-inspiring. Pain and terror often overwhelm “those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.” (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.) We feel pain because we are human, because we are always wondering and longing for the deeper meaning. Being human means we can change our position.

But apathy, apathy is a shallow pond. There’s not much to see with apathy, no places to go. It’s a one-horse town, an organism-breeding puddle. If I don’t care, I don’t have to feel. My plane will neither take off nor land, and the scenery remains the same because I have stopped seeing it for lack of concern, interest and enthusiasm. Me—I need a little needle of pain to get me motivated. I look to the injection site and pull back the skin. Because my apathy is just the surface; the real feeling is in the blood that pumps underneath. Everyone knows that blood brings healing. If I give it air, clean it, care for it, I’ll never have to reopen the wound.

They say that life fills a void. If I feel empty after I clean up my apathy, after I cry and flush it out, it’s because I have excavated the infection. If I have done my job, it will be a flushed, clean cache, ready to secretly store new valuables that I have yet to find. I know that out of dark places can come the greatest jewels. As a metaphor for that realization, I once dreamt my best friend and I were forcibly thrown down into a cave. I was unable to rescue us until I simply grew big and lifted her out. When she was safe, I cleaned and inventoried the crannies of my cache, finding a purplish green pearl in the corner. I found a treasure in the deepest corner of my prison.

If you are what you eat, then you are who you hang around with. I am only as good as my social milieu, and so I enjoy people who can be honest, kind and perceptive with me. I enjoy those who remember the simple pleasures (because of course, too much materialism and extravagance brings a blasé perspective.) I enjoy people who catch snowflakes on the tip of their tongue, make metaphors in their casual conversation, and are start new, exciting endeavors with courage and persistence.

This morning brings the third rejection letter in the last 24 hours. I feel disappointed, and I am a woman under the pressure of hormones… so I cry. I also watch the snowflakes fall outside my window—they are so lovely and beautiful. They land where they will, they fall because it is their fate and the earth is of no consequence to them. Following their lead, I must only write for myself, it does not matter where I land. Every word is a snowflake, a cold unique object that forms differently every birth. I catch each on my tongue and savor; they melt over my taste buds and sense like my tears. And then I laugh. Like the wind it blows the teary snowflakes into a different place. At least I care, at least there is breath for movement and momentum for journey. The snowflakes and the tears stop simultaneously and things are still and quiet.

I want my snowflakes to be thick, heavy with moisture and to fall lazily, with intention but slow. I want them to make an effect when they land, tasty like tears. I want the snowflakes to blur the reading to an internal sight, to fall onto the page and make an indelible impression on the warp of the paper, and the psyche.

This essay I wrote, “Overcoming an Unusual Communication Difficulty” won the William Verville scholarship at Northern Arizona University. I’m sharing it here with my son’s permission, because, as he says “everyone deserves a chance at being understood.”

Overcoming Unusually Challenging Communication Difficulties

The most challenging communication difficulty I have had in my entire life has been daily communication with my 18-year-old son.

Isaac has autism, with speech and language impairment. He did not speak his first words until he was two, and did not speak in complete sentences consistently until he was in elementary school. He takes things very literally and has difficulty with abstract thought. For instance, just two years I accidentally slipped up and said “Please put the milk on the fridge,” instead of “in the fridge.” He took me at my literal word and I found the carton next to the dust bunnies on top.

When Isaac was younger, he couldn’t seem to comprehend my words, or keep track of the sequence of things. I took to drawing visual to-do lists. This included a shopping cart for the grocery store, a book for the library, and a car for the mechanics. I had to do this for every event in the day. Just saying the sounds didn’t make it into his processing system. It was similar to working with a deaf person; he would rarely look up when you called his name. He barely knew what words were, and he would have a hard time transitioning from activities without the visual aides.

We used visual images for many lessons, including “social stories” when Isaac was 7-10 years old. As you can imagine, his social skills were poor. He could barely speak in sentences, and definitely could not communicate his emotions, much less identify them. I would draw cartoons of tough social situations, including situations that required more empathy.

Isaac’s biggest social problem was his inability to tell anything but the truth.

“How do these pants look?” I would ask.

“They kind of make your butt-cheeks look huge,” he responded.

Without protest, I returned those pants immediately. Telling the truth might make you socially awkward, but at least everyone always know where you stand.

Isaac’s psychological diagnosis claims that he is well below average in the working memory category. “Working memory is different than short-and long-term memory because it requires more than simple rote recall, and necessitates that an individual maintain mental flexibility while encoding information into short-term memory,” says his psychological report. This means that Isaac can’t process difficult abstract thought. He can’t remain flexible while problem-solving, or regroup for Plan B at a moment’s notice. To help with this, I try to refer to the past, to something he already knows. We use many strategies of apperception and preparation.

For instance, before we went to parties when he was younger, I would try to explain how I knew these people, and how he was supposed to act. I said, ​“Now this is a Christmas party with lots of adults I work with at the library. Ann is the hostess, and my boss. Make sure you greet her, shake her hand and look her in the eye. She’ll probably want to know where you go to school, what you like to study, and other stuff like that. After you answer questions, you can take your dinosaur books into a quiet spot and read them.”

After the party, I would say “Isaac, it’s not okay to touch someone’s belly, even when it’s very large… And no. She’s not pregnant.”

It also means that our conversations and resolutions aren’t immediate. Isaac’s memory does not fire at the same speed. Sometimes it fires slow, sometimes he jumps way ahead, and sometimes it’s just stuck in a loop, much like a moebius strip. It’s like communication in space; some transmissions get through, some get lost, some take a really long time to arrive. Somedays it’s like a black hole–I don’t think anything will ever surface again.

But with patience and a lot of humor, I’ve raised Isaac to adulthood. I think he’s a reasonably good representation of a responsible young adult. He has his driver’s license, a job at Safeway, and will be studying film through the Coconino Community College to NAU program, living on the NAU campus. He has found a communication medium that resonates with his self-expression. His self-confidence, patience, and good attitude will help him get the extra help he needs.

And most importantly, he has a good heart, and you can’t really teach that from books anyway.