22. Re-potting: From a Butte to a Dale

What's wrong with this lovely pot?
It's a beautiful hue
and its shape is a delight.
Placed just so in a sunny spot,
it lets me catch the sun's sweetest rays
and stretch my leaves towards the light.
It's my home
and I love it so.
And yet I long for more.
I dream of unknown pots on unknown sills.
I dream of reaching
for new light, new horizons.
I know I don't need to be re-potted.
But every time I ask
my roots, my stalks, my leaves,
They buzz and rustle and shake
with a full-bodied, joyful
YES. 

She’s a witch

Meagan is a little younger than I am, with short, graying hair, a kind face and eyes that see right through me. When I see her face appear on my screen for my therapy session, my whole body relaxes, and my weight settles more deeply into the chair.
I’ve worked with Meagan for three years, and she knows me better than anyone other than Jason. She has helped me, slowly and patiently, explore the most tender parts of me and come out stronger
She’s so good at her job, I think she must be a witch.
What else would explain how she reads my eyes, my hands, my body, and reflects back for me the inner world I thought was mine alone to know?
Today's focus is that little me sitting alone in the Lebanese mountains collecting fossils.
Meagan asks me to close my eyes and turn my attention inward. She guides me to tune into that little girl, to let myself feel her.
Something in me resists, unwilling to go there. But Meagan is patient.
She suggests I put both hands on my heart and relax my weight into my chair.  As soon as I do, I feel the resistance melt.
The tears flow. Then they turn into sobs.
My eyes stay closed, my hand on my chest. I can feel Meagan's kindness and confidence in me, in the whole and healthy me that knows exactly how to do this. Knows exactly how to heal.
As I sink deeper into the experience, I hear her gentle encouragement.
Yeah, she says.
I go deeper.
Yeah.
“ Yeah,” is all I need to hear to know it's safe to feel, safe to have my heart break for that scared, lonely little one. Meagan's gentle voice guides me to imagine soothing her, holding her in her fear and overwhelm.
And then it happens. The moment of magic. My whole body softens, surrenders to a warm, honey-like feeling. The tension drains out of me, and I feel such tenderness for that little one. For her fear and her pain.
But I also feel a surge of the strength and resilience of the confident, grown woman I am now. The one strong enough to hold and soothe her. She’s no longer alone.
I feel my feet grounded on the floor, my spine straight and tall, my heart soft and warm.
I feel safe. I feel strong.
The joy of it seeps out as a little smile on my lips.
Yeah, says Meagan.
Yeah.

Time for re-potting

Working with Meagan was one of the linchpins of my recovery. With her expert guidance and my continued nervous system work, I slowly guided Tante Sumaya—my nickname for the autonomic parts of my brain—to greater safety. I started understanding why certain emotional experiences were “unsafe” in my system and therefore led to physical symptoms (for more on how this works, see this video).

More importantly, I started rewiring them. These included traumatic experiences from my childhood, but also the much fresher trauma of the darkness I had experienced after a concussion and Covid sent my nervous system into a death spiral.

We developed a healthier relationship, Tante Sumaya and I. She started trusting me to take the lead more and more often. Or at least she was more willing to get out of the driver’s seat when asked kindly, firmly, and with the right language.

The right language was ‘somatic’ rather than ‘cognitive’. It involved using my breath, vision, touch, movement, and interoception. (for more on this, see chapter 15).

One moment of earned trust at a time, my body relaxed into greater safety and I got stronger. Symptoms quieted down and I started reclaiming my life.

The trajectory of this work was not linear. And it wasn’t easy. But it was definitely an upward trajectory.

[Note: Each of us has a different neural pathway back to safety. That pathway can be somatic, relational or environmental. My strongest pathway is the somatic one, which is why my toolkit is heavily weighted towards working with my breath and body. But this is not true for everyone.]

By the spring of 2023, I could do life. I could drive, be in stimulating environments (including the grocery store), spend some time on screens, socialize (in small doses), and even exercise.

I had made it over the hump.

I still had more healing to do, more safety and trust to invite into my body. But I had done the hardest part of the work.

I felt triumphant. I was on my way.

And I knew I could continue on my way no matter where I was. But I also knew that life in The Butte posed unique challenges to my recovery.

There was the obvious challenge that life at 9000 feet is more difficult for any body and brain, but especially so for a body and brain recovering from extreme chronic fatigue and post-concussion symptoms. Life is harder up there. And we had always loved that.

I loved it less now that I had to work hard to reclaim basic life activities, and that going skiing or biking still felt as likely as a trip to the moon.

But there was a second, less obvious challenge: everywhere I looked, both in my home and around town, were sights that reminded my brain of challenge and limitation: my bedroom where I had stared at the knots in the ceiling so long they had become friends, hovering above my bed in the silence; my bathroom, where I had spent countless lonely hours in the warm baths that were my only respite from pain; the landmarks on my daily walk where I had measured my progress, slowly increasing my capacity one rock, tree and fence post at a time; the parks and quiet places in town where I had sat and meditated, enjoying my new-found capacity to be out of the house, but not yet able to do much more than sit quietly in one place; and the concerned—and often pitying—faces of friends and neighbors in a tiny community where everyone knows everyone.

It was a daily uphill battle to redirect my brain away from old limitations to new possibilities. So we decided it was time for a fresh start. Not because we needed one. Because we wanted one.

At first, I was tentative about the idea. We so loved life in the Butte. We had raised our boys there. We had joyfully worked, played, and participated in the community. We had sunk roots, and leaving would be a painful uprooting.

When I shared my wants and fears with a friend, she responded in the most wonderful way:

“It’s Ok! You just need re-potting!” she said.

My heart sang at her words. She had perfectly captured what I was feeling.

I wanted to sink new roots into all that I had experienced and was learning. And I wanted to accept the challenge to unfurl into a new version of myself.

To do that, I needed re-potting.

So I started envisioning the home and landscape that might be our new “pot.”

I imagined tall trees, a shady front porch, and a creek or river to sit beside. I envisioned space for our four horses and three dogs, for our boys to visit, for me to write and do my art, and for Jason to work from home and rebuild his coaching practice. I wanted to garden and cook delicious, nutritious food.

I wanted warm, soft air. I wanted a warm, soft community.

And I never, ever, wanted to leave Colorado.

Once again, I wanted the moon. Or a unicorn. Or a unicorn on the moon.

So, once again, I prayed.

My own names for God

Dear one, you already know that by this point in my story, I had developed an intimate relationship with that divine presence that caught me again and again when I sank into darkness—the divine presence that seemed to be everywhere and in everything. Including in me.

That presence felt caring. Relational. Like there was something around and within me that cared what happened to me and guided me if I was willing to listen.

And it felt feminine. She felt feminine.

But it’s hard for humans to have a relationship with something (or someone) without a name. Our brains need to name things in order to feel into our relationship with them. Which is why I needed a name for her.

And God just wouldn’t do.

I know the word God was supposed to refer to the love and mystery at the heart of everything. But over the course of millennia, it was co-opted by imperialism and patriarchy, by power structures—temples, churches, and mosques—more interested in scaring, shaming, and dominating people than liberating them into the warm, loving embrace of a loving god (or goddess).

The name God inevitably conjures images of masculinity, judgy-ness, wrath, and begrudging forgiveness of “sin” if, and only if, we behave and follow the rules—the rules not coincidentally made up by and for the aforementioned power structures.

Thousands of years of shaming, scaring and oppressing people is a little hard to re-brand.

I know there are lots of brilliant people who are reclaiming God as the beautiful, loving mystery it was always supposed to be. Good for them. I, sadly, am not one of them. At least not yet. I feel a contraction in the middle of my chest every time I say the word God.

So I needed a different name.

First, I called her Bella.

It started when I listened to a talk by the spiritual teacher Michael Beckwith, where he referred to the divine as Beauty, Intelligence, and Love. This resonated deeply with me.

Jason and I started jokingly referring to the divine as “BIL” (pronounced Bill).

Which was fun for a little while, but I hated the maleness of it. So I switched to Bella. Sometimes even Bella Blue. Because there’s nothing that speaks more fully to the divine than the deep, translucent blue of a Colorado sky.

Of course, it’s probably no less problematic to refer to the divine with feminine names and pronouns rather than masculine ones, since I’m pretty sure it includes both masculine and feminine energies. But that’s a choice I could live with. And I figured what I called the divine in my own head and in my own home was entirely my business. And maybe my hubris.

More recently, in a nod to both the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine, I started calling her the “Great Mystery”, which Jason and I shortened to the “GM” as in General Manager. Which makes us chuckle and reminds us that we’re really not in charge and there’s something greater afoot than we’ll ever know.

That said, it’s probably more accurate to use the pronoun “they,” and to refer to them as the “General Managers” in the plural, because it seems highly likely that the divine is both masculine and feminine, but also includes many parts, just as we (and everything) seem to.

I marvel at Richard Schwartz—the founder of Internal Family Systems— and his vision of the holographic nature of parts at every level of life, including at the highest level. That too resonates deeply with my experience. And I applaud the younger generations that are pushing us to think past binary gender categories and start considering that a person can be “they” and “them.” I think it makes sense that the same might be true of God. Not long after I had this thought, I came across the work of Carmen Acevedo Butcher, who intentionally uses the pronoun they when referring to God. I was tickled.

They. The Great Mysteries. The General Managers. The GM. That’s the name that stuck. At least for now.

So that’s who I prayed to when I envisioned our new home and our new community for my hoped-for re-potting.

And I knew that I was asking for a lot. Real estate in Colorado is insanely overpriced. There was very little on the market in the mountain towns we were considering. And horse properties were even harder to find.

The list of “impossibles” was long. But I prayed for it all anyway.

And I got it all anyway.

Prayers answered. Warts included.

In early summer 2023. We went to see a small horse property in a sweet little Colorado mountain town called The Dale. Nobody here really calls it that, even though it’s a part of its name. But I’m taking the liberty to do so because it delights me.

It also delights me to report that, as I write this, we’re happily settled into that very property, loving not only our home and the land around it, but the kind community that surrounds it.

I’m sitting at my favorite blue table and chairs, enjoying the shade of tall Cottonwood and Aspen trees, a gentle spring breeze on my skin, and listening to birdsong and to the sounds of the little creek that flows nearby.

I’m looking up the hill at our blue farmhouse. Yes, you heard that right, dear one, it’s blue! As in Bella Blue. Dear one, Jason and I so love the blue that we named our new home “Blue Sky Ranch.”

We have a shady front porch complete with two wooden rocking chairs and a little table for painting on warm summer afternoons. And there, just past the house, is our barn (blue too!) and a small pasture for my horses.

There’s space for my boys to visit and a home office for both Jason and me. There’s a yard for our dogs. There are raised beds in the garden for growing vegetables. We have fruit trees and a patch of green grass to put out a picnic blanket and meditate or rest. And we have a lovely kitchen where I can cook for the people I love.

I’m still in awe of how any of this is possible. How did every one of my prayers get answered? What does that even mean? It stuns me. Maybe even scares me a little.

Not that it’s been perfect. My prayers were answered, but the answers came with an old boiler that requires so much attention that we’ve become friends with our sweet young plumber, Matt. They came with an old roof that we thought would last at least a few years, but that had to be replaced within eighteen months. The heat is cranky, there’s no AC, and one of the steps on the front porch recently cracked in two, nearly causing a guest to break an ankle. The kitchen tiles are shedding their grout prematurely, and the back deck desperately needs re-staining. And we had to replace almost all the kitchen appliances less than a year after moving in.

But we don’t care. We don’t care one bit. We love this place. We’re happy to be here, happy to welcome the miracle of it, warts and all.

No one said that answered prayers come without some thorny bits to keep us on our toes.

I’ve been re-potted and my new pot is a delight. It’s everything I hoped for to help me sink deeper roots, spread my wings and unfurl into new ways of being in the world. Into a new me.

Dear one, I can’t wait to share that unfurling and that new me in Part IV, the final part of this memoir.

I hope you stay with me for it. I think it’ll be fun.

If you’re new here, welcome!

However you made your way here, I’m grateful you found me and happy to have you pop into my little world, whether it’s for a brief visit or a longer hangout around my campfire.

Accidental Alchemy is a serial memoir, so if you’re curious and have the time, I recommend starting with the Prologue and reading chapters in order for the full experience. You can access all chapters on my Substack homepage.

For the best reading experience, I recommend reading in a browser and on a larger screen. It makes it easier to enjoy the art and navigate through the chapters with the buttons at the bottom of each post.

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PS.. All art and poetry included in this memoir are my own unless I specifically credit another author or artist.