We Can Do Hard Things

I have only been “reading” via Audible books since the fire. I don’t have space for physical books + only have time to listen to Audible while on beach walks or long drives. And I’ve been needing books for my healing journey, so I’ve become an avid listener.

I had heard about Theo of Golden when it first came out and immediately listened to the sample that Audible offers you to “flip through” the spoken pages to decide whether you wish to purchase a title.

I closed it after listening to only several sentences. I was not ready. I could tell immediately this was a book that would require my heart’s recent losses and traumas to be poked and prodded. I needed more healing to be ready for that.

So, for the last several months I have been listening exclusively to memoirs of strong women overcoming hard things. I devoured them, one after another, taking solace in their wounds’ stories, feeling deeply understood by women I will never meet who share my anger, sadness, frustration and that exquisite very particular joy-that-comes-from-overcoming. These books have been a key piece of my healing process.

***

And then I had to do a very hard thing. I had to go to a conference last weekend where I had to interact with more people in a matter of several days than I have even spoken to in total since the fire.

I can’t do a lot of people these days. My nervous system is still healing. Parties are painful. Large groups of any kind are hard. Even one-on-one meetings or small groups can be hard for me. I’m in full throttle healing mode which is a very inward-focused process. So being constantly “on” for hundreds of humans for several days was a very big ask of myself. I prepared diligently in the weeks leading up to this trip, working on my nervous system every single day so that I might be ready.

While at the conference, I escaped during the one brief break I had each day to work out, swim and most helpful of all, float in the hotel pool, releasing all the stress I could into the water.

It sometimes takes a lot to take care of our hearts. But it’s always worth it. This was priceless healing time.

***

As I went to bed the night before returning home, I was proud that I had done this hard thing and it was a success. As I looked ahead at my long travel day ahead, something told me that I was ready to download Theo of Golden.

Walking through the airport listening to the book’s first chapters I was smiling non-stop. Witnessing - via beautifully written pages being read to me — the story of beautiful people doing beautiful things, has a way of locking in a smile.

And so it was locked.

Until it wasn’t. Until the chronicling of beauty turned to stories of the inimitable ways that our smile-inducing-lives make hard right turns toward painful events, and then a left turn back to the beauty that extricates us somehow from the pain, before the next right turn toward another heart expanding challenge.

Sitting on the aisle of the plane, tears streaming down my face, I couldn’t catch them fast enough to save the large man behind me and across the aisle from having to monitor my sanity. I tried and then gave up.

These were big, righteous, beautiful tears.

Some were invoked by the incredible acts of kindness by strangers chronicled in the novel. They reminded me of the many strangers - and distant acquaintances — who came to my aid after the fire with incredible kindnesses.

Heartbreakingly beautiful humans are everywhere.

Some big sad tears flowed for the losses I endured, that we all endure in our lifetimes. Losing beloveds, enduring violence, loss in all its many forms.

The heartbreaking proof that we are alive, that we have loved, that we have survived, that profound grief can be — somehow, some way — survived.

This book broke loose many tears that had not yet been released since the fire because I’ve had to survive, endure, accomplish, unravel, learn. I didn’t have time to be sad.

Another line in the book that healed my heart a little bit:

“You are strong and you are brave - even when you are sad.”

I hadn’t really been allowing myself to be sad. I had sadness. I awakened with a heavy heart a lot. I still do some days. I have felt a bit like the Charlie Brown character, Linus, moving through the world with a dark cloud around me — like the ash from the fire was still floating in the air around me.

Tears are helping to wash away that ash so it can go into the earth to fertilize the next thing to be born of this loss.

***

My experience reading this book - almost entirely outside the privacy of my home, out in public — walking, driving, flying — was that I was either smiling or crying the entire time. I didn’t care that I gave my drink order to the flight attendant through tears because I was immersed in the glorious, colorful, uplifting, life-affirming journey through the beauty and pain of being human.

There was one line in the book that sums up my love for it — and also speaks to why I was afraid to read it because I heard this magnificence even in the several sentences I heard several months ago:

“We own all the world’s hearts together.”

Our interconnectedness and responsibility to help hold each other’s hearts is … well, sometimes it can be too much to bear. Talk about doing hard things, eh?

Yet, we all know the world is begging us to be more kind to each other’s hearts. I am grateful that Levi’s book has a way of gently encouraging us to be our better selves.

***

Renowned actor, David Morse, narrates. His performance is a revelation, bringing all the characters into their full wondrous light. I wondered as I listened if he read it exactly as the author Allen Levi would have read it himself. After the book closes, Levi reads his postscript, "A Thousand Thanks” and you can know in hearing Levi that Morse did the book 100% justice.

***

The beach where Stella and I walk is constantly changing. One week it is covered with driftwood, another with large soft round stones, another with too many dead birds to pick up, another covered by glistening blue Velella Velella. This week while listening to the second half of the book: every few steps there was another feather. White, grey, brown, black…feathers everywhere. Some sticking straight up in the air from the sand like freshly bloomed flowers. Some seemingly carefully, gently placed on our path.

It appears that in the wee hours of the morning when the beach is left to its own devices, it too reads and has been enjoying this novel, leaving the evidence for all to see.

I do believe I snapped a photo from afar of Late Night Beach + Sea Storytime last night… Theo of Golden even makes the sea and moon smile.

I hope it makes your heart smile too should you read it…or listen to its glory as I did.