February, 2025
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Ebb and Flow 2.0
I’ve quite the collection of drafts from this month and very few actual posts. The world around us all has been chaotic and hard this month. I uploaded this picture of mine to the media folder for a draft about feeling hollow. The post was raw, written at around five am after glancing at the headlines and feeling completely vulnerable and helpless. It also wouldn’t post for reasons I still haven’t figured out.
It was difficult to find a picture in my photo library that captured the hollow feeling flooding me. This shot from the Oklahoma City Myriad Botanical Garden came closest. The empty spaciousness of this large room, the cool, shadowy nature of the space felt right. That morning, the bright light of the outside world, the trees, their shadows, the warmth felt so far from where I was, where we were, though, that I almost didn’t use it. It felt too much like a hope I couldn’t muster.
To me, the saddest thing about losing that post from last week is that I don’t remember what set me off, what made me feel so completely depleted. I don’t remember because the blows keep coming; I don’t remember, because the specific blow doesn’t matter any more. I’d tentatively titled that post “Ebb and Flow,” I know I was trying to remind myself that becoming hollow creates space to refill.
Refilling is what I’ve tried to focus on the last couple of weeks. Enjoying the brief time I had with Ouiser, catching up with people using actual communication – not just memes, creating the best environment possible for my team, and remembering to practice self-compassion. In her book Self Compassion Kristen Neff provides a mantra for hard times that came back to me as I re-shelved books in the new office.
This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is a part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment.
I’ve often adapted this mantra for whatever situation is wearing me down, and I find it helpful. The reminder to be kind to myself prompts me to focus on refilling and rehabilitating myself. Taking the time to do the soft things like take a candle lit bath in my wonderful tub, sitting by a fire pit for a glass of wine in the evening and a cup of coffee in the morning; and doing the hard things, eating well, getting movement into every day, writing, maintaining my restorative practices even when I don’t “want” to.
This is a moment of suffering. Collectively and individually we are suffering, and we don’t know how long this moment will last or how deep it will become. Suffering is a part of life. It is natural and okay to feel hollow, to feel depleted when the suffering is so large, when it just keeps coming. Up right and breathing is sometimes the absolutely best we can do in a day. Recognizing and naming the suffering is the first step that will allow us to start ameliorate the suffering. May I be kind to myself in this moment. This mantra helps me remember to be kind to myself when I start calling myself stupid and lazy for not doing all the things right all the time. It also helps me remember to be kind to others when I can.
Remembering to be kind to myself and others is always the first step in refilling myself. We don’t have much time to refill these days. The blows come swiftly and drain away the little reserves we have. It’s okay to feel hollow, to have days that feel hopeless. It’s natural, but so is refilling. We just have to keep going until this moment passes.
All this has happened before …
The important work is done. The guest bedroom is complete, for now. Ouiser will even have her own TV to enjoy while she is here. The new office, well that is another story, it’s not so complete. There are piles of books and stuff all over the floor. My new desk is in its place, though. And I’ve cleaned off just enough space to write at it.
Dragging the piles of things from one room to the other, I stumbled across this old post-it note titled “Daily Quarantine Questions” from 2020. I don’t remember when I copied down these questions, or where I got them from, maybe Brene Brown. I’m so glad they survived the last five years, because they were an amazing reminder of how to get through chaos and overwhelm.
- What am I grateful for today?
- Who am I checking in on or connecting with today?
- What expectations of “normal” am I letting go of today?
- How am I getting outside today?
- How am I moving my body today?
- What beauty am I either creating, cultivating, or inviting today?
I am 97% sure I don’t need to explicate for you why these questions felt so relevant and perfectly suited to this moment. This is a blog, though, and that kind of thing is kind of what we are both here for, right? Don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief. The sweeping scope and pace of change in the first two weeks of the current presidential administration has felt chaotic, to put it mildly. Announcement after announcement has kept everyone on edge; it’s been hard to find the space to pause between the stimulus and response, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl.
These questions came back to me at the perfect time. They provide a path, showing us how to find the space for ourselves. They also made me realize how much we’ve all internalized since 2020. Of all the things to be grateful for in the past two weeks, the greatest has to have been realizing how we’ve learned to check in on each other when things are hard. Yes, I am purposefully using an expansive “we” here. I don’t think it is just my small circle of friends who have spent the last few weeks, sending a couple of extra texts, making overdue phone calls, and maybe even sending the occasional piece of snail mail. These questions and these practices are the skills we learned five years ago that are going to strengthen us today.
![They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by [Abdurraqib, Hanif] Book cover. Blue background, picture of wolf head and chest on a man's body wearing a red track suit with white strips down the shoulders and arms, and a thick gold chain around its neck.](http://grabow.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/TCKUUTKU.jpg)
Finding the questions also made me curious about what, if anything, I’d posted about the questions in 2020. I looked back through the archive, something I rarely do, and found this entry, “Unexpected Joy,” from February 2020. If you are new here and haven’t read this book of essays by Hanif Abdurraqib yet, you should. They are great. The post, written in 2020, actually talks more about 2016. It doesn’t mention the questions, but it does address what the questions are meant to help you find – the unexpected joy. Like connections, and maybe even growing out of our connections, joy is essential to our survival, to our healing, to our resilience. I think I say it best at the end of that entry.
Abdurraqib concludes, “Joy, in this way, can be a weapon–that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or moths, or years.” And I remember how beaten down I felt in the years leading up to 2016. How alone I felt trudging from one crisis to the next just trying desperately to hold it together, to make sure I could provide for my family. Yes, there were moments of joy in those years, friendships made, but I remember how my smile rarely reached my eyes, and my guard never fully came down. In 2016, joy became my weapon. It carried me forward each time an event beat me down. Joy also became the weapon of my recovery. It flooded my life in the fall of 2016: the house full of friends at the birthday party I threw for myself, the renewal of old friendships, the long mornings and afternoons on the deck, the comfort of the dogs and cat as we settled into our new normal. The joy in those moments, big and small, salving my wounds, healing me, and carrying me forward.
Ask your questions, check in with your friends, and may you all find your joy.
D5 Creation