How I Meet My Readers, How They Greet Me

Plenty of us have found ourselves at a crossroads where we desperately need a life change. In Boundless, I show you how to get beyond yourself and imagine a new future.

Cottonwoods, late afternoon sun, UCross Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming

When I tell people about my forthcoming memoir Boundless (September 2024, Atmosphere Press), I say it this way: It’s about how, when you have become no one, you can become someone again.

When I get the knowing nod, I understand I’ve met my reader. Suddenly, I am looking at a face that has shed its outer protective layers and connected to an inner world that yearns for something deeper. Their faces glow a little, like they left the windows open at night and they don’t care. 

That tells me what I already sense about my readers is true: They are looking for a path to reinvention.

How did you become a ghost in your own life?

Plenty of us have found ourselves at a point in life when we desperately need a change. We know things cannot go on the same way—the hard truth is that present life is already broken. We need to live somewhere else. We need to love someone else. We need to be making our living a vocation, not a job.

We don’t want to see all the ways the present life isn’t working. We don’t want to see all the ways we have been a ghost in our own lives—living in the same place, loving someone who is missing or never showed up in the first place, doing the same work that never brought us alive to begin with. For some reason, we keep haunting our own old lives, and we have become invisible even to our own selves. 

How can it be that we want a transformation, but we cannot get ourselves in gear? It’s because we cannot see beyond what we know.

Imagine this—living in a new truth

Someone reminded me today that in Celtic Christianity, the belief is not that Christ died to restore us where we used to be—but rather to resurrect us into something we have only just begun to imagine. (That someone is John Philip Newell, author of Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, and he’s speaking at a spiritual retreat this week in Sheridan, Wyoming.)

The Celts sit apart from the Roman Catholic empire and British imperialism because they employ the imagination as a faculty of insight, he reminded those of us gathered today at UCross Ranch. Old systems, old ideas—the old lives we cling to—shrink from the imagination because they believe the whole truth has already been found, documented and institutionalized. 

The Celts believed in the infinite truth, and for this reason, they were pretty scary to the Roman Catholics and conquering Brits, who wore the rigid armor of a pretty confining truth and wanted everyone else to wear it, too.

What is true about your life and the reason you are here is always changing, as open as the blue sky and vast as the cosmos.

UCross Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming

My colossal failure of imagination

The way to change your life is to open your imagination.

Yet that is precisely what I could not do in Boundless, as I faced the end of active motherhood, with the twins living under my roof, and my journalism career in a death spiral. All of my ideas about my future were feeble.

Here is a passage from the book, on the cusp of my twins graduating from high school and leaving my nest. Because I was a single mother, two-thirds of my family was leaving at once.

“This colossal failure of the imagination filled me with dismay. I hardly recognized myself. I could not imagine doing the same stuck life I’d been doing, only without them. They (the twins) were the reason I got through this same stuck life for all these stuck years. The stuckness had a point. At some point, it would no longer have a point. We were reaching that point.”

I often say that Boundless is about recovering your emotional agility—the skill of being flexible, curious and fleet. 

Early morning frost, UCross Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming

No armor, just questions

Try asking your own self why you believe what you believe. Or try asking that to someone you have known for a very long time, maybe even someone you have given birth to, as I do on the day I’m dropping off my son at college in Boundless.

After a spring of raucous cries for freedom and a summer of discontent, my son and I are together again, and I am settling him into his dorm. I go all-journalist on him, interviewing him like an anthropologist in the field. I don’t bite on the same old offerings. I don’t give him life lessons. I simply ask him why he decided to become a vegetarian like he’s someone I just met.

And then, in a cafe adjacent to a bookstore where once I gave a reading on a book tour, and I told an audience about all of my ideas, I sit quietly and listen to all of his ideas. 

On this day, I had arrived curious, “without the armor,” as the poet Rebecca del Rio says in “Prescription for the Disillusioned,” without “the rigid overcoat of experience” and without all the things I thought I knew.

At last, I had found the way to change my life. I didn’t know what place it would be or whom I would love or what I would write next. All I knew was, I was astonished again.

Prescription for the Disillusioned

Come new to this day.

Remove the rigid

overcoat of experience,

the notion of knowing,

the beliefs that cloud

your vision.

Leave behind the stories

of your life. Spit out the

sour taste of unmet expectation.

Let the stale scent of what-ifs

waft back into the swamp

of your useless fears.

Arrive curious, without the armor

of certainty, the plans and planned

results of the life you’ve imagined.

Live the life that chooses you, new

every breath, every blink of

your astonished eyes.

~Rebecca del Rio

How can you learn to be boundless?

What is disillusioning you right now? What new lives are calling to you? What is coming awake in your imagination? Let’s expand the conversation. 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1AV_Z4yOdLOep5w_0-tUU5x4Nz04-osiRcUiKkG6xajI/edit

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