Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Michelle

Navigating the New Landscape of You

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A few years ago I dramatically pruned the shrubbery in my backyard. For two days I went at it with the loppers, chopping off clumps of foliage, clipping dead twigs, sculpting and reshaping the remaining branches. When I was done, the landscape was transformed.

Noah, our resident Tree Lover, was not pleased – he disdainfully called me Paul Bunyan for weeks afterward – but I loved it. I could see more of the sky and the neighbor’s house across the street. Light streamed into spots that had previously been dank and dark. Though it was still the same size it had always been, the backyard suddenly felt much more spacious – open, airy and inviting.

Still, for about a week after the dramatic pruning, every time I glanced out the sunroom windows into the backyard, I did a double take. The landscape was so different, so unfamiliar – I hardly recognized it. Even though I loved the openness and was glad I’d pruned the shrubbery, my new backyard took some getting used to; I had to reacquaint myself with it.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Kimberly read my blog post about whitewashing the reality of poverty and Voxed me with an idea. It was a good, strong piece, she said, and she suggested I might want to rework it a bit and pitch it to Christianity Today. It was a timely topic, she noted – something she thought would resonate with a broader audience.

I immediately set to work researching other online articles on global poverty and mission work, reviewing Christianity Today’s submissions guidelines and considering how I would reshape the post into an article that might resonate with CT’s audience.

In the middle of that process, though, I became aware of the slightest bit of a pit in my stomach, which in turn prompted me to ask myself a question: Do I actually want to revise this blog post and pitch it as an article to Christianity Today? Do I want to do this work?

At first, in spite of the stomach pit (note to future self: the pit tells the truth!), the answer was not readily apparent, and so I held out the question – Do I want to do this work? – and examined it further. I turned the question around and around and gave myself the space for my true desire to make itself known. I allowed myself to figure out how I actually felt about pursuing this opportunity.

In the end, I realized I did not want to revise my blog post into an article to pitch to Christianity Today. I realized it was, in fact, the very last thing I wanted to do.

Turns out, striving is still my default mode. After a lifetime of pushing to make progress and striving for measurable results, it’s easy, almost mindless, for me to fall into my old habits and rhythms. Striving is familiar terrain for me (and just to be clear: striving to achieve a goal or make progress is not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it can be a very good, very positive thing. But it’s not the thing I want to do right now). On the other hand, this new place I’m now navigating – this place of writing solely for creative pleasure, of writing toward no particular outcome – is still largely unknown and unfamiliar, which makes it equal parts exhilarating and unnerving.

I am discovering that it takes intentionality to learn to live and thrive in a new landscape. I’m learning to slow down rather than steamroll ahead, to look inward at my own needs and desires rather than capitulate to what I think I should do or what I assume is expected of me. I’m learning to ask myself probing questions and then allow the time and space to listen for and hear the answers that come from my soul.

I’ve done some dramatic pruning in my life over these past several months, and while it’s been a fruitful, space-making, life-giving process, and I generally like the results, it’s also taken some getting used to. I am, in many ways, getting reacquainted with myself. I am still navigating this new landscape of me.

 

Why Your Passion Doesn’t Have to Be Your Job

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This morning on the way to school, my son Noah, who is a senior and deep into the college application process, mentioned he might want to attend the University of Nebraska here in Lincoln. “That way,” he said, “even if I live on campus, I can still come home to take care of my plants.”

I bit my tongue to keep from blurting, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” I mean, really — who selects a college based on its proximity to their houseplants?

Well, the answer is: Noah does. Because plants are Noah’s passion.

Noah started collecting plants almost before he could speak in complete sentences. This is the kid who, when he was a preschooler, sat on Santa’s lap at the mall and asked for the book Designing with Succulents for Christmas. I’ve never seen a Santa Claus look so utterly baffled as I shouted out from behind the velvet rope, “It’s a gardening book!”

The shelves in Noah’s room are lined with succulents and cactus. A rubber tree is staked near the window, and a dracaena marginata sits adjacent to his nightstand. In the early mornings, a fuchsia glow seeps from the crack beneath his bedroom door, light from the “grow lamp” he bought for his candelabra cactus. When I went to Honduras this summer, I texted him photos of giant agave clinging to the rocky hillside. I know my son; he prefers pictures of plants over people.

I thought about all this in the car this morning after Noah made his declaration about choosing a college that’s close to his houseplants. “That’s fine; I get that,” I finally said (diplomatically). “But you know,” I added, “I’m surprised, given how much you’ve always loved plants, that you don’t want to major in botany or horticulture. Plants are your passion, so why wouldn’t you want to major in something that would lead to a career working with plants?”

Noah has told us that he wants to pursue a major in the humanities. He’s mentioned English, German and history as possibilities; he insists he’s not interested in science, in spite of his obvious proclivity toward plants, the environment and nature.

“What about botany? What about forestry? What about environmental studies?” my husband and I ask from time to time. We’ve always expected, assumed, Noah would pursue something planty, something sciencey. Which is why I asked him this morning, “Why? Why wouldn’t you pursue something that is so obviously your passion?”

Noah shrugged. “Your passion doesn’t always have to be your job,” he answered.

Photo credit: Curt Brinkmann

Photo credit: Curt Brinkmann

I wrote my first book, Spiritual Misfit, 12 years ago (it was published in 2014, but it was written long before that). It took me two years to write the first draft of that book, during which time I would awaken before dawn, pull on my red fleece robe and a warm pair of socks and traipse down to the basement, where I hunched over the keyboard for an hour or two while my preschooler and toddler slept.

During those early mornings, tapping out words on the basement computer, I lost all track of time. The world did not exist during those hours. Time did not exist. My responsibilities and the demands of my daily life did not exist.

There was no blog (that came later). I didn’t have a Facebook account, Twitter hadn’t gone mainstream and Instagram didn’t yet exist. I didn’t know what a “platform” was. I wasn’t thinking about “felt need” or audience. I didn’t know anything about proposals or querying or agents. Sure, I had dreamy hopes that maybe someday I would publish whatever it was I was writing, but that all seemed very vague and very distant.

Mostly I wrote because both the process itself and what it revealed was intriguing to me. I wrote because through the process of writing, I discovered important things about myself, and I was curious to uncover more. I wrote because writing revealed myself to me. And because it was fun. Writing the first draft of Spiritual Misfit was a pure, undiluted pursuit of passion.

“Creative fields make crap for careers, but creative living can be an amazing vocation,” writes Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic.

This may not be true for everyone. I’m sure there are plenty of people, Gilbert herself included, who are able to successfully meld their passion and their career into one fulfilling, delightful pursuit. I have learned, though, that I am not one of these people.

Over the last ten years, writing morphed from my play and passion into my profession. It was a slow change, so slow I didn’t even recognize what was happening. I think maybe for a little while I was able to have it both ways — a passion that was also my profession. But over time, the demands of my profession — platform-building, meeting a “felt need,” mainaining social media, growing an audience, tracking sales, speaking, attending conferences, managing launch teams, writing book proposals and articles — edged out my passion bit by bit, until finally, like the moon covering the sun in a total solar eclipse, it obliterated it entirely.

Today I find myself in a different place. I have a job that I like and find fulfilling but is not my passion. The professional demands that strangled my passion for writing have fallen away. I am not building a platform or writing for a particular audience or striving to address a “felt need.” I do not feel the need to be productive with my writing. I’m not thinking about branding or messaging. I deleted my professional Facebook page, and I post on Instagram when I feel like it. I’m writing what I want to write about — and when I hear myself saying, “That’s selfish,” I tell myself, gently, “No, it’s not.”

Once again, I am remembering why I like to write. I am remembering that writing is fun and helps me feel more deeply alive. Most of all, I am remembering what I knew 12 years ago when I wrote the first draft of Spiritual Misfit in my basement, which is exactly what Noah clarified for me in the car on the way to school this morning.

I am remembering that my passion doesn’t have to be my job.

Photo credit: Curt Brinkmann, Life’s A Story Photography

Terra Incognita

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A few mornings ago, when he glimpsed me reading my own book on the back patio, my husband yelled out to me from the living room, “That is the height of narcissism!” He was joking, of course (and he was wrong…the height of narcissism is actually taking a selfie of yourself reading your own book). I laughed – albeit a little sheepishly – but the truth is, I need to re-read my own book.

When I wrote True You, I assumed I was writing it from the perspective of a person who had done the hard work of pruning and come out the other side. And while that’s true – I had done some of the hard work of pruning, the fukinaoshi of the soul – what I didn’t know at the time was that I wasn’t anywhere near the other side. What I know now, from the middle, was that back then, I had only just begun.

As I told a friend recently in an email, pruning begets pruning. We make the first large cuts, and when we’ve pulled the dead, unnecessary limbs and branches away and discarded them, we discover we are not finished. Stripping away what’s not needed makes space for us to see what’s underneath. We realize there is, in fact, more pruning to be done.

Breaking my book contract and stepping out of the publishing arena was a very big prune. It took me a long time to weigh the pros and cons of that decision. As gardener Judy Maier advises, I looked at “the tree” from all angles. I asked a lot of questions. I consulted with people I trusted. I walked through all the steps toward change that therapist Lori Gottlieb outlines in her fabulous book: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation and action. Over a period of about three months, I went from, “I can’t possibly break my contract” to “maybe I should break my contract?” to “I’m going to break my contract.”

And then I did it. I broke my contract, paid back the advance and withdrew from the publishing arena. I dragged the pruned branches off to the proverbial compost bin, dusted off my hands, and settled in on the back patio with a cold glass of iced tea to rest in my newly pruned life.

Except just as I was getting comfortable I spotted another branch. A smaller branch, but a branch nonetheless. And then I spotted another. And another. And I knew my pruning work was not done.

I’ve been practicing a creative ritual these last few weeks called morning pages. The idea, which comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, is a simple one: every morning you write three longhand, stream of consciousness journal pages. You can write whatever you want, whatever comes to mind, just as long as you keep your pen moving.

I’ve tried to do morning pages in the past, but I’ve always quit a few days in. This time, though, I’ve stuck with it (though I admit, not every single day), and while there are times the practice feels fruitless and boring and stupid, I am beginning to see the value in it.

What I am learning through the practice of near-daily morning pages, along with working through some of the questions and exercises in The Artist’s Way, is that I don’t know myself. At all. I don’t know what brings me joy or delight. I don’t know what my dreams and desires are. I don’t know what I like to do for fun (except read.) I can’t really remember what I loved to do as a kid (besides read). Most days I don’t know how or what I am feeling under the surface.

I am newly pruned, and I do not recognize myself.

Three years ago I heard a question resonate in the depths of my soul as I sat on a park bench on a November afternoon. Why do you have trouble with intimacy? I tried to answer this question in the pages of True You, but the truth is, I’m not sure I have lived into the answer. I might have answered the question with my head, but I didn’t answer it with my heart.

As I continue to be pruned open, this question about intimacy has resurfaced, and I know it’s not only a question about opening to others and opening to God, but also about opening to my own self.

Right now as I peer under my surface, what I see is blurry. This is progress. Six months ago I was fragmented, disintegrated. Cameron reassures me this blurriness, these questions, this vagueness are a normal part of self-discovery. “Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working,” she writes in The Artist’s Way. “You are your own promised land, your own new frontier.”

I Googled terra incognita just to be sure I understood its meaning. It’s Latin for “land unknown” and at one time was a term used by cartographers for regions that had not been mapped or documented.

This feels right to me. I am but a speck on the horizon – a land unknown, uncharted territory, ever so slowly coming into focus.

Time Wants to Show You a Different Country

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I walked with my oldest son Noah on the prairie Sunday night as emerald dragonflies swooped over a landscape abloom in a riot of wildflowers. The air sung, a symphony of trilling insects and rasping cottonwood leaves, a bobwhite’s questioning call, a goldfinch’s exuberant twitter. All around us the hills shimmered with sunlit bluestem.

It was astonishingly beautiful. And yet, I was gripped with sorrow.

My mind was on the young man who had taken his life the day before. A boy Noah had grown up with through elementary and middle school. A boy with a mom and a dad, with siblings and grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. A boy with a whole life yet unlived. A boy.

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Last week I sat on my back patio and watched, rapt, as a large wasp with iridescent midnight blue wings straddled a dead cricket on the cement near my feet. The wasp hitched the insect to the underside of its abdomen and then scooted with its cargo toward the dirt under the barberry shrub, where it backed down into a hole, dragging the cricket behind it.

I was curious – curious enough to Google “black wasp and cricket” to see if I could find more about this puzzling behavior. From my research I learned that the cricket wasn’t actually dead; it was paralyzed. Turns out, after mating, the female black wasp doesn’t scavenge for a dead insect but instead immobilizes one that’s still alive – typically a grasshopper, cricket or katydid, a bug with substance. After dragging her paralyzed prey into the hole she’d dug earlier, the wasp lays a single egg onto the insect. She then goes back out to capture two additional insects to add to her lair, ensuring the nest is well-provisioned. Upon hatching, the larvae, safely cocooned in the host, have plenty of food to sustain them until they mature and are ready to emerge from the burrow.

As strange and perhaps macabre as it might sound, I admit, as a mother I can relate. Like the female wasp, I, too, endeavor to do everything I can to protect my children – to cocoon them in safety, to provide for them, to ensure their health and well-being. I, too, would like nothing more than to keep my boys swaddled forever in the security of my home and my protection, as far as possible from the many threats and dangers this world presents.

And yet, I know that like the mother wasp, I, too, must release my children into the larger world and allow them to emerge into themselves.

The truth is, this scares me. I am afraid to let my children go. I am afraid of the many threats I know about and, even more, the many I can’t even begin to fathom. I am afraid of what I can’t control, afraid of the fact that as they venture farther and farther away from the nest, the less I am able to protect them, provide for them and help sustain them. I am afraid, too, that the more they begin to emerge as themselves, the less I might know them, the less I might understand them.

Sunday night I opened Facebook Messenger to send the young man’s mother a note of condolence. I typed in her name, still at a loss as to what I should or could say in the face of this inconceivable tragedy. There in the chat box, unexpectedly, was the thread of our last online conversation. It was from August 2010, a note confirming plans for Noah’s ninth birthday party – pizza at Old Chicago and a movie, Despicable Me. It was a quick exchange, noting the time for drop-off at the restaurant, the time for pick-up after the movie – mundane, ordinary. My heart broke over what we couldn’t have foreseen then. My heart broke over everything that was still possible nine years ago.

“Time wants to show you a different country,” wrote the poet William Stafford. Sunday evening I walked with my eighteen-year-old son on an astonishingly beautiful evening on the prairie. Side by side we bent low in the grass to peer at an elegant orb weaver, remembering the spider we once nicknamed Clem after we discovered it nestled in the clematis vine in our garden. Side by side we snapped photographs of sunflowers, purple thistle, feathery bluestem. Side by side we walked the grass path to the top of the hill, where we leaned against the weathered fence and waited for the setting sun to paint the clouds before it slipped below the horizon.

I think nine years ago I naïvely hoped I might be able to keep my children safe forever. I think I pretended that we could stay cocooned. As each year passes I understand more deeply, more painfully, how impossible this is. Each year I also see and understand a little more about the country time is revealing to me, a country that is both more beautiful and more heartbreaking than I ever could have imagined.

Why We Need to Stop Whitewashing the Reality of Poverty

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“One thing I noticed right away was how happy the people are,” a friend said as we chatted about my trip to Honduras a few days after I had returned. She, too, had traveled to Honduras a few years ago, and she admitted she had been charmed and impressed by the people she’d met there.

I nodded, agreeing with my friend’s observation. It’s true, the people I met in Honduras did seem genuinely happy. I noticed it too. They were quick to laugh and to smile. Many of them clearly enjoyed engaging and even joking around with “the North Americans,” as they called us. They exuded a sense of ease that was both disarmingly unfamiliar and deeply appealing.

And yet, ever since that conversation with my friend, I’ve felt uneasy. I can’t help but wonder: what if in declaring the people who live in developing countries as “happy,” we are oversimplfying both who they are and the circumstances in which they live?

The people are so happy. The people live such simple, contented lives.  The people have their priorities straight. The people value what’s truly important. The people are free from all the trivial, materialistic stuff that bogs us down.

There is truth to these statements. I witnessed genuine joy in Honduras. I saw a kind of life that was, in many ways, simpler and far less materialistic than my own life. I met people who value family and community, who work hard and who love God and their neighbors.

But that is only part of the story.

The whole story is much harder and much more complicated. The whole story is that in addition to smiles and joy, I also saw unimaginable poverty and suffering in Honduras.

I stood in a shack constructed of metal, wood remnants, bed sheets and tarps, a shack barely larger than my bathroom, a shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing that was home to five human beings.

I witnessed nearly 100 people wait outside in the broiling sun for hours to receive basic medical care.

I handed dozens of mothers deworming tablets for their children, knowing that poor sanitation virtually guarantees the parasites will be back before long to wreak havoc in their digestive systems.

I jump-roped, sang songs and played tag with dozens of laughing, smiling, exuberant kids who will likely not have the opportunity to continue their education beyond elementary school.

The reality is that my pet dog enjoys a more comfortable, secure existence than most of the men, women and children I met in Honduras. The animal who lives in my house and has her own bed, her own vet, her own toys and a steady supply of food, clean water and medicine has better healthcare, better nutrition and better living circumstances than most of the human beings I met during my eight days in Honduras.

I think sometimes we rewrite hard stories into more palatable versions simply so we can more easily justify our own privilege and comfort in the face of global poverty and economic inequality. But the truth is, whitewashing reality into an idyllic, romanticized half-truth is not only irresponsible, it’s also deeply disrespectful to the people who live that reality every day.

I don’t claim to have the solution to global poverty and economic inequality. Honestly, it all feels more daunting than ever, and I have no idea what my small role in the great scheme of things is or should be. But I do know this: we can start by telling not the story we wish were true, or the story that relieves us of responsibility, or the story that makes us more comfortable, but by telling the whole, unvarnished truth.