Category Archives: Fiction

This Lent, I will love the wildness in me.

Posted on by
Little girl sitting in the forest with sun shining on her

Cleaning the irrigation ditches, “acequias,” is a tradition in Northern New Mexico. Farmers dig acequias to bring water to their fields. Every spring, at the beginning of the growing season, the community gathers to weed and dredge the ditches, so the water goes where farmers want it to go and waters what they want it to water. Acequias have deep roots and a holy place in Pueblo and Spanish New Mexican culture.

Cleaning the acequias has long been one of my favorite metaphors for Lent. This week, as I was listening for what wanted to be written to you, I realized that cleaning the acequias is a tame metaphor. It doesn’t work for me anymore.
 
What’s Lent?
Lent shares a root with the word “lengthen” and refers to the seven weeks before Easter, a time of lengthening daylight in the Northern Hemisphere. Lent is when many Christian religious folk prepare intentionally for Easter by taking on a Lenten discipline.
 
Lenten disciplines often involve giving something up—chocolate, alcohol, social media—or taking something on—Bible study, meditation, decluttering. The point of a Lenten discipline, traditionally, is to make room in one’s heart and life for the risen Jesus on Easter Sunday. A focus on sin—how we fall short—and penitence—how we can punish ourselves so we’ll do better—loom large in this traditional mindset. 
 
Many progressive clergy and church communities do their best to steer their Lenten focus toward spiritual growth and wholeness. Given the deep rootedness of sin and penitence in Lent, they’re fighting an uphill battle.
 
Back to acequias.
Irrigation, no matter how picturesque or historic, domesticates wild water. Copious, noisy, wild water, flowing downstream from snowy mountains, is diverted into smaller and smaller channels. Weeds are not allowed, only crops that meet the needs of farmers or landowners.
 
Four years ago, I wrote “A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent.” It went a little viral in 2019 and has now been read over 60,000 times. I think that post resonates so deeply because those words refresh and renew like cold, clear water. They feel good in our bodies. They feel healing. They feel true. They feel like love.
 
Traditional religious ideas about sin and penitence can hurt. There is no healing in fear-based disciplines.
 
“The Cathedral and the Well” is the story of a pilgrim walking through the desert, searching for water. She’s checking old maps and sees that water is around somewhere, but she can’t find it. She’s desperately thirsty, and all she sees is a ruined building made of dry, dusty stones. Then, in the silence of the desert, she hears the faint sound of flowing water. She follows the sound and discovers that it’s coming from the building! She moves a loose stone aside and the sound gets louder. She continues to pull away stones until there’s a gap big enough to crawl through. Once within, she sees a spring of living water emerging from the dirt. She drinks deeply.
 
For centuries, pilgrims passing this way piled stones to mark the location of the spring. Over time, the stones had completely covered the life-giving water. (I’m renaming this story “The Cathedral and the Spring.”)
 
We can choose Love-based disciplines. We can choose wild disciplines. This Lent, I want to love the wildness in me. I want to love my internal wilderness—the inappropriate, unkempt, honey-sticky, dirty, weedy, weird parts—the parts I try to hide. The parts I haven’t quite gotten tamed so I keep them closeted and caged.
 
Peregrina Martha explores wildness through the lens of old-growth trees in this excerpt from Lost & Found, my Camino novel. (For more, you can download a free PDF here. The novel’s a bit of a mess in places, with occasional salty language.)
 
 

Going Wild
I watch my hand that holds the hammer that pounds me into a shape that fits the proper hole. I pound and pound myself, but I don’t quite fit. I squeeze a bulge in here, shave off a sharp edge there, and pound and pound and pound. I try to whittle myself down to nothing so I can disappear. Bang bang bang on my head hits the hammer. Square peg in round hole. Redwood into toothpick. I cut the inconvenient pieces off. I limb myself so I slide smoothly into the mill.

Limbs are where the wild things live – where birds make their nests.

Limbs are an impediment to masts and poles. I will wield the ax for you. Let me cut off my limbs to make myself suitable for industry. I will make myself straight and rigid and useful to you powers. Let me read your mind and do what you want before you ask it, so you are blameless.

Behold the limbless handmaid of the Lord.

I will stop pounding myself into a hole that will never ever fit. I will regrow my limbs and branches so wild things have a place to live. I will nourish my roots and reach for the roots of others.

I am no longer espaliered.

I am a Redwood. I am an old Ponderosa…

I am regrowing myself. I am undebecoming.
Deep kindness. Compassionate heart.
Put down the hammer and the axe.
Let go. Free fall. Trust.
Allow yourself to be who you are.
Completely here…

We are not a fiber farm. We are not a monocultured industrial forest. We are old growth. We are many- layered, and we harbor secrets. Sasquatch lives within us. We hold stories upon stories. Our usefulness is not immediately apparent. Tiny communities of uncommon organisms live only in us. We are interwoven and interdependent. We contain entire ecosystems in our crowns. Marbled Murrelets nest in our upper limbs, bathed in Pacific fog. A thousand feet above the ground, seedlings sprout from leaf duff six feet deep.

We are the old ones. The living ones…

You are deeply loved.
Growing is your job.
Be who you are.
Exform your Self into the world.

Prepare.

Good questions for Lent:
Old-growth Redwoods contain entire ecosystems on their branches and in their crowns. What chopped-off limbs will you regrow? How wild will you let your crown get? What axe will you put down?

Living Water flows in the Wild places. Who’s thirsty in your heart? What desiccated places within you yearn for wild water? What parts of you long to be rewilded? What stones will you dislodge so Living Water flows freely? What internal wilderness will you explore? 

These are, for me, good questions for a healing, holy Lent. I offer them to you with love.

P.S. If you’d like my latest writing, news, and coaching offerings delivered to your inbox, please subscribe to my weekly-ish newsletter here, and thank you! 


[Photo: Melissa Askew on Unsplash]

Who do you think you are?

Posted on by
Raptor flying in golden sky

This is a raw passage from my novel-in-progress, which begins where my first novel, Lost and Found: A mystical journey on the Camino de Santiago, ends. (You can download it for free here.)

Setting: Three days have passed since Martha walked over Monte Irago and past La Cruz de Ferro after saying goodbye to Hope and her dad, the final scene in Lost and Found. Martha and two other pilgrims—Sophie, an American, and Kevin from Ireland—sit at the long table in the dining room of El Serbal y La Luna (The Rowan and the Moon), an albergue in the tiny town of Pieros. They’ve agreed to walk together the next day, free of stories and identities. All they know of each other is names and nationalities.

Salty language warning: Martha has become quite fond of the “f word.” She and her companions use it in this passage.

The other pilgrims have drifted away in noisy clumps, leaving only us three at the long table. The hospitalero has disappeared, evidently having fulfilled his duties for the night. The hospitalero’s wife is clearing what looks like a hundred dishes from the table. Two older American peregrinas, around my age, are helping, feeling sorry for her. We listen to the helpful peregrinas’ halting Spanish as they ask her for directions, and her attempts to convey her wishes. But dish-doing is a universal language, it seems, and soon the only sound coming from the kitchen is running water, clattering of plates, and soft rudimentary Spanish.

I feel guilty for a heartbeat, wondering why they’re in there working and I’m out here taking my ease. I take solace in the smallness of the kitchen and its current bustling fullness. There’s no room for me in there. And it’s not my job, so I choose gratitude and turn my attention to the job in front of me. This is my job—to be here now with these two people, as fully as I can be, without pretense or façade.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s try this and see how long we last.”

“What do you want, right now, this minute?” I continue. “Are you comfortable? Do you want to find somewhere else to sit? Are you ready for bed?”

After a moment I answer my own question: “I’d like to go outside and sit under that serbal tree in the courtyard and look at the stars. And maybe catch a glimpse of la luna, as well. Would either of you care to join me? I’d love your company.”

We sit in silence outside for an hour, simply being in the dark. I notice that sitting in the dark is a lot easier when you have company.

The next morning we find each other in the dining room for café and toast. After breakfast we walk and talk on the way to Villafranca del Bierzo.

“I don’t know what’s next in my life,” I say. “I feel simultaneously excited and scared shitless about that. I’m in the wilderness between settlements, I guess.”

“How do you know … no, let me start over,” Kevin says. “What’s scary about the wilderness?”

“The wilderness requires a completely different skillset,” I reply. “The wilderness takes self-reliance. Trust in my own skills to survive and find my way. Trust in my environment to provide, and trust in my ability to recognize sustenance and direction when they show up.”

After a pause, I continue. “Living in a settled place with other people goes best when I follow the rules and stay in the grid. That’s what I’ve been doing for so long.”

A longer pause. “I thought the Camino would be safe. Instead, it blew me apart. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m in this in-between place, between my old settled life and something I don’t even know what it is yet. And walking through this unknown place,” I continue haltingly, as I find the words, “is something I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve never learned it. No one’s ever taught me how to do this. Actually, they’ve taught me the exact opposite of how to do this. And I, in turn, have taught it to others. … Oh God. I’ve perpetuated the grid. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“Well, when we know better, we do better. Right?” says Sophie. “I’m with you, Martha.”

“What do we have to count on when we blow our lives apart?” I ask. “Where do we put our feet? Or do we just fall and fall and eventually learn how to live in this air, wind in our faces, that sinking feeling like an elevator drop in the pits of our stomachs, until that sensation becomes normal or at least typical and we’re no longer so freaked out by being blown up and away that we recover our centers and realize we’re okay? We’re just falling and it’s okay?”

“What if it’s flying instead of falling?” asks Kevin. “What if it’s not going to kill you eventually, and you can go back down to Earth anytime? What if up here you have perspective? What if up here you can see the lay of the land? What if … Oh! This just in: what if you’re not blown up at all? What if a mighty force has simply kicked you out of the nest? It’s been watching you—this big mama hawk watching you get too big for her nest, refusing to fly, expecting to be fed—and she’s finally seen her chance to get you into the air? The Camino was her opening and she took it! You’re not blown up, pieces falling to the ground. You’re flying, Martha. You’re fucking flying! And birds don’t carry any extra weight, do they? They can’t.”

He stops. “What do you think, Martha? Actually, no. How does that feel, Martha?”

“A lot better than thinking I’ve been blown up,” I say. “Flying is scary because it’s unfamiliar, but at heart I know how to do it. I was born to fly, not to stay in a nest. I have what I need, built in, to do this. I am what I need to do this.”

I stop in my tracks. “Oh my gosh. The only thing stopping me from flying is believing I can’t fly.”

Photo by Shreyas Malavalli on Unsplash

Happy dying and rising! Happy Easter!

Posted on by
2
On the Camino de Santiago

Today is Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum, the three holiest days of the Christian church year. These three days—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter—are the crux of the matter, literally. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and resurrection are the heart of the Christian story.

Even if you’re not Christian anymore or ever, these three days are the heart of your story as well.

Death and resurrection are the way of things. We were born to die and be reborn over and over until our physical selves can’t hold us anymore. We suffer when we resist this basic truth—to be an Earthling is to be constantly dying and rising again. Change isn’t linear or always pretty. To be alive is to die and rise again, over and over, messily, imperfectly, gloriously.

As we grow, change, and evolve, we will find that we need to shed our too-small skins. I feel like I’m shedding my skin like a snake these days. Dropping identities and stories left and right. Shreds of (metaphorical) tissue-thin skin fall off me constantly. I feel messy, imperfect, and maybe just a little glorious.

This is the Easter story. This is the human story. This is our Earthling story. Jesus’ story is our story. Jesus’ death is our death, and when he rises again on Easter, he rises for all of us. He shows us the way home.

This excerpt from the last pages of my novel Lost and Found (available for free download here) describes a dream of Martha, my peregrina hero. In her dream, Martha integrates cut-off parts of herself, sheds her now too-small skin, and becomes a new creation.

Martha wakes up before sunrise in the albergue in Foncebadón, a few kilometers down the mountain from La Cruz de Ferro. She lies in bed listening to the sounds of pilgrims waking up and getting on with their days – the rustling of convertible pants and water running in the communal bathroom. She’s tired of writing. She’s tired of thinking. Today she only wants to walk in beauty. She yearns to shed this old skin that keeps her small and tired. She feels the pinching of the chrysalis. It’s time to emerge. She feels the pinching of the too-small skin. It’s time to shed. The snakeskin is a more apt metaphor than the chrysalis. She feels more like a snake than a butterfly. She feels low to the ground and slithery and heavy, not light and airy and floaty. She feels powerful. And beautiful.

Last night’s dream floats into Martha’s awareness. In the dream, she enters a cave in search of something she’s lost. In the cave is a cage full of children, all about seven years old. They’re girls, and they’re mangy and crazed. She’s frightened and repulsed. They look up when they see her, all except one feral child who’s sitting in the corner, muttering and chewing her snarled hair. Like refugees, they crowd to the chain link fence that encloses them and reach out their hands to her.

Martha’s heart sinks. She doesn’t want to know this. She doesn’t want to know these children are here. She doesn’t want the responsibility of knowing they’re here. What is she supposed to do with them? Clearly, they can’t stay here, and now that she knows they’re here, it’s her responsibility to take care of them. Her cheese is falling off her cracker. She feels unhinged, because she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that these girls are parts of herself.

That one’s Courage and the one over there is Creativity. Those two are Imagination and Intuition. There’s Playfulness. The feral one with the snarled hair, the one sitting on the dung heap in the corner, muttering and biting her fingernails, is Rage. She sees Desire and Tenderness, too.

Martha feels a hand in hers and looks down to see clean and tidy uncaged children surrounding her. These are the little girls who have been with her all these years – Worry, Anxiety, and Fear, and the sturdiest of them all is Sadness. They’ve been faithful companions, and they tell her they’ve missed their sisters.

They tug on her hands to show her where the gate is. They tell her that her job is to let their sisters out of the cage. She’s safe and it’s okay. It’s time to shed the skin that keeps them in. It’s time to tell the truth and to acknowledge the sadness, yes. But more than that, and even scarier, they want her to let them rest a little. Sadness, Worry, Fear, and Anxiety would like to share the burden with Play and Anger and Courage and Imagination.

They understand this means Martha won’t feel in control anymore. The parts of her who want to explore and create will take her to places she didn’t even know existed. They won’t let her stay small and quiet and hidden.

Fear says, “Martha, I’m tired of steering you and keeping you safe. How about you let me share the load with my sisters? I know you’re scared. You’re scared that you’re going crazy. You’re not crazy. You’re brave. You’ll be even braver when you let Courage out to play with us.”

“How do I love them?” Martha asks Sadness and Worry. “How do I take care of them?”

“You know how to take care of them,” says Hope. Where had she come from? “You’re compassionate and strong, Martha. You only have to let yourself be reborn.”

“Here,” Hope says, and unlocks the gate. “Come out,” she says to the caged girls, “and let’s take care of Martha.” The little girls come out – some with shouts of joy and some with trepidation – to join Hope around a pool. The pool is surrounded by ferns, mosses cling to the wet rocks, and steam rises from it.

The girls slowly and reverently help Martha disrobe and lead her to the pool. They gently urge her to lie down in the warm water. They stroke her and rub her and sing to her. Martha realizes they’re rubbing off her old skin. They raise her up and walk her to where the sun is entering the cave. They rub her dry with soft, thick, warm towels. Her new skin is thin and porous. Martha feels both raw and incredibly strong. The girls rub her new transparent skin with oil, still singing.

Martha sits down on a granite boulder and opens her arms. One by one the little girls crawl into her chest. Martha is big enough to hold all of them now. Last to crawl back in is Hope. She reaches out and hugs her mom as she returns where she belongs. Martha looks inside her heart. Hope and the little girls are playing in the grass by the side of the desert creek, watched over by their vigilant guardian.

Fully awake now, Martha emerges from her sleeping bag. Her dad’s bunk is empty. She wants to mark this metamorphosis. She digs out the scissors in her foot care kit and goes to the garden of the albergue. Her only companions are the chickens. With the scissors made for cutting bandages, she cuts off her hair so it’s sticking out about an inch all over her head, like a halo. A messy gray halo. Hair is all over the ground. Birds will use it for nests. In this windy place it will blow away before lunchtime.

Whatever your faith or spirituality, I wish you a blessed death and rebirth.

May we trust our hearts. May we trust God, whoever and whatever Holiness is for us.

Happy Easter!

Love, Barb

Image: Jed Holdorph, 16 May 2014, Camino de Santiago

The Messy Flamboyant Contradictory Wholeness of Reality

Posted on by
1
Getting ready to hike the Sierra in 1972

This is me, my little sister, and my dad getting ready to head off into the Sierra Nevada wilderness on our annual backpacking trip. The photo was taken in 1972, I think, when I was fourteen and Carol was twelve. I posted this photo to Facebook on Father’s Day, because even though my dad’s been dead for over 40 years now, I wanted to express my gratitude for the gifts he gave me, primarily my love of wild places. So many people responded with positive comments, mostly about what a good dad he must have been.

But he wasn’t. Not really. Not in the classic sense. At the time of this photo, he and my mom had been divorced for several years. He was actively drinking, and he was between wife #2 and wife #3. My brother, sister, and I called him “Wayne,” not “Dad.” Our mom gave me and my sister those “Chicken Shirt” t-shirts for this trip – perhaps, I see in retrospect, as a commentary on our father.

There are so many questions I’ll never have answers to. He died in a skiing accident when I was twenty-one, and my mom’s been dead for almost twenty-five years. There’s so much I don’t know or can’t remember. I was just trying to keep my head above water while saving my family from drowning.

For decades, I’ve held either the good or the bad Wayne, but not both together. He was the good dad who took his girls into the woods, or he was the bad dad – the arrogant alcoholic who hit his son and his dogs and left his wife to be with other women. Somehow, his goodness or badness meant something about my goodness or badness – if he was bad, I was irrevocably wounded junk. If he was good, I needed to deny my own experience in order to defend and prove his goodness. But he couldn’t be both.

Now, today, through writing my first novel that includes an imaginative seeing into my dad’s reality, I’ve found healing and forgiveness. I’ve found acceptance of him in his totality, as far as I can know him or it. I’ve found a way into my sequestered pain and grief, and an understanding of my dad’s choices, through writing about them. It’s a sort of miracle.

I’ve learned that healing comes through listening to and feeling the pain and grief I’ve carried for half a century, and letting go of the suffering that comes from wanting life to have been different. Healing comes through accepting reality as it is, with all its messy contradictions and flamboyant wholeness, and profoundly owning my “one wild and precious life.”

Death and resurrection is the way of the universe. Healing grace – resurrection – is always available to us.

Love is always there for the flowing, even if it takes fifty years.  

Happy Father’s Day, Wayne.

Love, Barb.

Joy in the woods
2020, Three Sisters Wilderness

PS. You can contact me here if you’d like to talk about any of this.

2020 photo credit: Jed Holdorph

“Uncertainty, Risk, and Emotional Exposure”

Posted on by
8

That’s how Dr. Brené Brown defines vulnerability.

On June 1st, I put my novel, the story of Martha, a middle-aged woman who walks the Camino de Santiago, on my website as a free downloadable PDF. Yesterday I posted about and promoted its presence. Today, I feel vulnerable in about twenty different ways.  

I don’t know if anyone will read it. If you do, will you like it, hate it, or be bored?

If you don’t like it, if it offends you or annoys you, what will that mean about me?

I’ve shared a few raw pieces of my childhood in it, and I’ve included a scene I’m just not sure about. Martha’s conversations with the Divine will offend some readers. (If there are any readers.)

I’m swimming in uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Thankfully, other creators have lived through this and shared their wisdom. I’m finding strength and courage in these words from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear:

“Recognizing this reality – that the reaction doesn’t belong to you – is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If pople misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud?

Just smile sweetly and suggest – as politely as you possibly can – that they go make their own fucking art.

Then stubbornly continue making yours.”

So why be vulnerable? Because here’s the thing. Everything I’ve said about my novel applies to my life, my whole life, when I’m being who I am in the world. There are aspects of me, when I’m living in integrity and letting all of me show, that you might not like. I may say something that offends you. I might just be ignored. Or misunderstood.

It’s simply not my job to manage your reactions to me. It’s not your job to manage my reaction to you, either.

Our purpose is to be who we are, as fully and completely as we can be at this moment, stubbornly and continually. Living as whole people requires accepting the discomfort of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. As my ability to tolerate and even embrace the discomfort of vulnerability grows, the fuller my life becomes. My tolerance for uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure — vulnerability — is directly correlated to the amount of peace, freedom, creativity, and true connection in my life.

I’m proud of myself for sticking with Martha, myself, and this story. I’m proud that I’ve brought it into the world. I’m proud of myself for risking vulnerability. Whatever happens, I’ll have done this courageous thing. However this turns out, I’ll have grown my capacity to tolerate discomfort for the sake of growth.

You can download Lost and Found: A Magical Journey on the Camino de Santiago here.

She’s here! (My novel is live.)

Posted on by
2
A statue of the Virgin Mary in Najera, Spain

What does it look like when a woman returns to her true nature?

What does it look like when a woman sheds the armor of culture and reclaims her true identity? What does it look like when a woman discards the disguises and camouflage she’s accumulated over decades of striving to fit in, to be who others want her to be?

A middle-aged woman walks the Camino de Santiago, and finds a whole new life within herself she never knew existed. What happens when that woman, faced with the potential disruption created by allowing that new life to emerge, says “Yes”? What shifts when that woman begins to understand that her healing is the highest desire of God, the Universe, and the Camino? What wisdom does that woman hear when she acknowledges that her former ways of getting through her days no longer serve her on this journey?

Lost and Found: A Magical Journey on the Camino de Santiago explores these questions. You can download it here. And thank you!

~Barb

Somethin’s comin’!

Posted on by
8
Barb Morris Camino de Santiago

I’ve been away for a while, finishing my novel. It’s my second big pandemic project. (My first one was becoming a Certified Wayfinder Life Coach. I finished my training back in 2012 but never jumped through the certification hoop.)

This novel erupted out of me in March of 2017. Its seed was a dream I had about a woman walking the Camino de Santiago who follows her soul’s urging to step through a little door into a Spanish church. Magic things happen. I totally “pantsed” it, a writing term that means I made it up as I went along. Magic happened because I pantsed it. I would never have had the courage to write some of what I wrote if I’d been following an outline.

Finishing this work has been challenging for me. I’ve shared bits and pieces on this blog, made sporadic attempts to edit and revise, but couldn’t muster up the energy to buckle down and get ‘er done. I’ve had to write connecting scenes and invent characters to make it all make sense. I’ve never written a novel before, and since I think I need to do everything perfectly the first time, whether I’ve done it before or not, I got just a wee bit stymied.

Now it’s coming, and it’s coming soon. I decided to publish it as a free PDF on my website, which lowered the pressure enormously and made finishing it possible. Those of you who’ve been asking when you can read the whole thing, I’m aiming for June 1st. Putting this child out into the world in an imperfect form (and believe you me, is it ever imperfect) is a huge stretch for me. But it’s taking up room in my creative abode, and it needs to leave home.

So that’s me. What have YOU been up to?

~Barb