Thank You For Your Patience
On taking the time and grace you need, whether or not anyone's offering it, and the relief that's possible when you allow yourself to be and be seen as a work-in-progress
I’m rounding the corner on two years of publishing on Substack. I just counted, and this post makes 79 times I have taken a breath and hit “send.” These last two years also coincided with the worsening of my mom’s terminal illness and its rapid takeover as the main emotional background noise in my life. She had a combination of Lewy-body dementia and Alzheimer’s-type dementia, which culminated in her death just a little over a month ago. It was an unexpected but fitting synchronicity in many ways, some that I can only see and feel now that I am on the other side of the initiation of losing her.
I published my first essay Failure is Holy—on the fall equinox on September 21, 2022. Starting on a fall equinox was intentional. The timing works both metaphorically and magically, as in my alchemy-infused cosmology, fall is the beginning of a new cycle. While the winter solstice might be the moment of inception or seed planting, alchemy teaches us that all transformation and birth/rebirth processes begins with death. New forms come from the decomposing and recomposing of old, tired, falling apart forms; the “failure” and rot of matter in the fall re-enriches the exhausted soil. Psychologically, we have to let go of the known world; we have to let the former solid ground of our life fall away. While letting go can be painful, the emptiness and lostness that follows unmooring, it all creates the initial conditions for something new to happen.
“Failure is holy” was also a private nod to what I learned teaching personal storytelling classes for ten years — the best stories, the most compelling ones, are stories about failure, about things not working out and being unbelievably hard and what comes of it. We actually hate success stories. We want to be one, we want those we love to be success stories, but reading or listening to one is unbelievably boring, disappointing even. What we really want to hear, what we need to hear, when we tune into someone else telling their story is this: how did you personally and specifically survive this difficult, often humiliating experience of being human? I used to say to my students, “Failure is holy here. Unexpected failure and enduring it and sometimes even arriving somewhere else unexpected after it, good or bad, that’s what we want to hear about. All your failures are now on your resume.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what this writing project would become, beyond my essential commitment to keep writing for new and full moons in an expanded space. I only had just enough of a vision to get started, and to stop letting my not-knowing-where-I-was-going get in the way. In that light, I couldn’t go wrong consecrating the effort to the sacred practice of trying and failing. I wrote then:
My failures have always served as a prequel, not to success exactly, but to something that is more true. I’m still learning this: the failure of things not meant for me is the necessary portal to discovering what is, and in the process, who I really am. If you are in the midst of a failure or ending right now, take whatever comfort you can from knowing it’s right on time at least, and things falling apart is a sign of incipient rebirth. Whether we are ready or not, the season of soul and depth and failing and feelings is here. Another underworld journey is beginning. Whatever happens next, our suffering will be compounded by our unwillingness to not know, and be lost, and let go of old definitions of things.
The night after I hit send on that first post, I had a dream:
My husband Brian and I are eating at a restaurant I think in Los Angeles, and we get seated at a table right next to the actor, Kevin Kline. We try to ignore him to be polite, give him space and peace, but he strikes up a conversation with us. We all just hit it off, and end up scooching our tables together and sharing our meal. Eventually strangers start coming up and interrupting, asking for photos and autographs. He’s being nice, but it’s stressful, so we pay the check and walk out together to our cars. As we are about to part ways, he touches my arm, and asks me if I talk to my mom now that she’s dead. He shares that he contacts his own dead mother almost every day. I tell him I have had my first experience of contact and that it was kind of intense. He seems to understand exactly what I mean, to have been there himself once, and he assures me I am going to get the hang of it. Then we all hug goodbye.
Another dream scene followed, one where I literally drop a ball while getting on a kind of exposed roller-coaster ride, but it was this exchange with Kevin Kline about our mothers that made the whole thing glow with painful importance. It was the first dream where my mom was not sick, or dying, but already dead. In the incredible way it is with medicine dreams, it wasn’t just a message telling me to get ready—it somehow got me ready. It did the job. It made me feel like it had already happened, and that I had survived it. Dream-Kevin-Kline’s warmth and encouragement, his certainty that relationships continue on after death, his reassurance that I would learn how to love her and talk to her across the great material divide, whatever that means, all of it settled into me. I entered this new difficult season of my life feeling somehow prepared.
On my next visit to my mom that fall, sure enough, it was obvious she was losing cognitive ground more rapidly. She was constantly on the move, flitting around the house from room to room, forever remembering something she wanted to do and then forgetting it, not fully here or anywhere. But there were also still brief stretches of lucidity. We were laying in her bed together when she had such a stretch, and she told me matter-of-factly that she knew she was losing more of herself, that her brain was dying, and that sometime soon she would have to go a care facility. She was very worried about how hard it already was on her husband, and how much harder it was going to get. She said she was going to try and go without a fuss when the time came. I reminded her that she probably wouldn’t have any control over that—the putting up a fuss or not—but to try and not to worry about all of us. This was just the way it goes, the messiness of dying. Then she said, “You know Mindy, my love for you is like an energy that you can tap into whenever you need to.” I teared up and said, “I know, mom.” We held each other’s gaze for a moment, full of love for each other, and then, just like that, the solid presence in her left. She couldn’t remember what we were talking about. She felt a mysterious urgency to get going somewhere, got up, and left.
Friends. These last two years have been so hard, and have stretched my heart impossibly, and I don’t want to write about the specific details of that here. I kind of just want to stand here at the end of it for a moment, having lived through it. I want to name for myself the conditions I’ve been writing under, just as an act of self-love and self-recognition. While being a full-time somatic trauma therapist and teacher, while being a poet and a partner and an auntie and a daughter and a sister, I’ve been writing and publishing faithfully here. I also had to get groceries, and make food, and clean, and move my body—all the things. The first year, I somehow managed to keep up a pace of four posts a month, also publishing sometime on or after the first and third-quarter moons. The first half of the second year, I managed three posts a month, getting out at least one additional essay to love on my paid subscribers. But by late spring of this year, as my mom got sicker, I stopped being able to write those extra posts. Every ounce of my extra energy was going into the furious kind of love that grieving is. Every free day on my schedule had to be spent crying and sleeping. By the last month of her life, I was in a continuous ceremony. And yet, I still was able to show up for my foundational practice—writing about the new and full moons—or it was able to show up for me.
Maybe that’s just the nature of devotion. And maybe it’s that the subject of my devotion, the Moon, is one of the great guardians of change and grief; writing about the Moon turns out not to be, in any way, extraneous to the processing of living through loss. Maybe it’s the magic of process and commitment and limits. Whatever the reason, it seems wild to me, and important to have this meta moment, where I state it for the record.
My mom Lynne was a professional death worker—an ordained minister, hospice chaplain, and bereavement counselor. In the last decade of her career, she spent most of her time not with the dying, but with the living left behind, teaching people how to grieve, or how to survive the changes grieving brings. We’ve talked openly about death since I was a kid, and she fought to normalize and protect grief as both an ordinary and holy part of life. So I’ve had this unspoken pact with her, and with myself, to not apologize for how her dying and my grief has slowed me down. Even as I’ve dropped balls and let people down, even when I felt like an apology might be warranted, I’ve stopped myself. I’ve returned to a well-worn practice, one I used to stop constantly saying I’m sorry over a decade ago: I’ve just said thank you. Every time I’ve had an impulse to apologize—for not responding in a timely manner, for not being able to follow through, for cancelling plans or not being able to make any, for not checking in often enough or at all on people I care about—I’ve said thank you instead. Especially: thank you for your patience. Thank you for your understanding. I’ve been assuming and frankly just taking grace from everyone I come into contact with, whether or not that grace was really on offer. In doing so, I am realizing that it was always an option—giving and receiving grace, or as Sonya Renee Taylor might say, radically loving myself exactly as I am, without apology.
I used to be afraid of all this—of publishing a regular Substack like this—because it would mean letting myself be exposed as an unfinished work-in-progress. It would mean having a creative process in public, live and in real time, and inviting judgement and rejection, not just every few years, but like every few weeks. It would mean being seen when I was doing my best work, and conditions were supportive and loving, and also when I was not not doing my best, when conditions were very harsh. I’m here to tell you, two years in, it’s not all that frightening. There has been some success—just even the success of keeping on keeping on—and there has been some holy failure. I have not created the perfect, vague thing I had in mind. But I have created something real. There is real relief to just making what can be made and sharing it.
Of course I am a work-in-progress. So are we all, right up to the end. Authenticity isn’t a static state you achieve and stay at; it’s dynamic. Sometimes you can only know it and have it by trying to have it and failing, and then adjusting course. I am allowed to learn and grow and unlearn and heal and change and be changed—so are you. What if we all just made what we could, learned from our own judgments and reactions to our own work, shared what we wanted to share, and just trusted others to do their own winnowing? Life is just too short, and the world too chaotic and too in need of honesty and care and art. We cannot wait for good conditions or perfect readiness.
Ever since that new moon in Virgo, I have experienced a return of some of the executive function I had been steadily losing over the last two years without realizing it. I feel a little reinvigorated. I’m writing more again, and building some things behind the scenes I’m excited about. Losing someone you love will do that to you too—kick you hard, right in your aliveness. Anyway, I plan to keep tending our connection here, and I hope you’ll keep sticking around to study the moon and other cosmic and earthly forces with me. It is an honor to be in community with so many fellow witches and writers and embodied mystics all just trying to read the room, sense what time it is, and live in a good way in this world. I’m sure many of you, like me, feel the constant, loving pressure of creative projects and books wanting to happen through you, of a life that wants to be fully lived. I’m sure many of you, like me, are having a hell of a year, in a series of years. So, thank you for your patience, with me and with yourself. May we continue to not apologize for being who we are and where we are at. May we continue to take grace, and give it. And may everything we give come back to us, generously.
Holding you in love, Mindy.
“We cannot wait for good conditions or perfect readiness.”
Thank you. For all of it. We love you, Mindy.