Tara Rodden Robinson :: The Productivity Maven

Burning Down the House

I almost burned the house down.

Years ago, when we lived in Auburn, Alabama. Every morning I would light a candle or some incense in the bathroom. One morning, when I scratched the strike anywhere kitchen match against the box, the head of the match broke off and went sailing into the trashcan. I paused and peered inside, looking for the match head amongst the wads of tissue, gobs of hair, and other junk. Seemed okay. Went on about my business.

When we got home that evening, the house smelled like smoke. Oh shit.

We went to our bedroom and the doorway to the bathroom was sooty. Oh shit.

Looking inside, we found the shower door shattered--pieces of glass all over the floor, in the tub, the sink, everywhere. Oh shit.

The trashcan had caught fire and lit a towel that had been hanging on the shower door. When conflagration reached some critical temperature, the glass exploded. That’s what put the fire out. That’s what prevented our house from burning down.

I don’t remember when I stopped breathing. Maybe it was seeing the smoke damage on the ceiling or the blistered paint on the wall. Maybe it was the smell that trapped my breath in my body. And I was clenched tight, ready to accept whatever angry tirade my husband gave me. I deserved it. It was all my fault.

My beloved turned to me. I’d never seen his face more serious, never in the almost ten years we’d been together. He looked deep into my eyes and said, “No more matches in the bathroom, okay?”

And that was it.

No flames singing my eyebrows. No screaming. No profanity. He just gave me a hug and that was that. And he’s never brought it up again.

But deep down, I expected anger. Not just from him. From just about everybody. You see, I’d grown up with flames all around me. My dad was a rage-a-holic.

I’d never really considered how that formed me, my daddy’s rage and all that flame throwing, until after he passed away. It had never occurred to me that I’d lived practically my whole life clenched, braced, tensed for the next tirade, the next spewing lava hot screaming fit. Every night now, I wake up and remind myself to relax. It feels weird to first realize that I’m jamming my jaw shut or digging my elbows into my ribs and then to feel the relief of letting that go. Over and over again.

There’s a lot to let go of.

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Metaphorically, this summer, my house burned down.

My business partnership broke up. My dad died. All my sources of remuneration went up in flames.

The place in my head where I lived, the possessions I deemed important: my dreams, my ambitions, the plans, the trappings of my image of myself--all are in ashes, white and powdery, scattered across my inner landscape.

David Whyte, in his incredible audio book, What to Remember When Waking talks about the necessity of this sort of cremation, one that’s required to reach the ultimate authenticity, the deep sound of your genuine. “What’s called for,” he says, “...is a radical form of simplification. That whatever complications you’d arranged for yourself... there’s the eye of a needle that you have to pass through... and that many of the things you were wearing or carrying or you had as a burden on your back, have to been unfastened or dropped aside.” 

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I’ve long been fascinated by the sadhus of India. These are holy men and women who take on extraordinary acts of religious devotion. Some of them live in the cremation grounds--and they go naked and smear their bodies with ashes. Supposedly, this is meant to signify the transience of our earthly existence. But I see their practices somewhat differently now.

“We are frequently tempted to censor difficulties, to hide them even from ourselves,” writes Monsignor Massimo Camisasca. But self censoring becomes a “diabolical act,” an act “born of the fear of losing the positive image that others have of us. ...to hide your own limits, your own problems, really doesn’t make any sense. You do not find freedom from your own miseries by censoring them but by handing them over to Christ, which is to say, by letting him embrace them.”

Or, in my case, immolating them, a burnt offering. Burning down the house.

With everything burned away, there is great freedom. Smeared with ashes and reeking of smoke, there is no concern with reputation or image. All the dross, the trivial, the mundane is scorched off. The tightness, the grasping, the clenching--all released. With nothing left to lose, there is nothing to protect and nothing to fear.

And what remains after the conflagration is the essential.

Love. Compassion. Forgiveness. And a faint fragrance, a sweet whiff of  might be frankincense or myrrh.

Flying Lessons: How I Overcame Uncertainty and Leapt Off a Cliff

Once upon a time...I was a nurse. In an abusive marriage. Living with a yearning.

If you’ve never experienced a yearning, you are both blessed and cursed. Blessed because undefined, crampy, incurable yearnings are gut wrenchingly uncomfortable. Cursed: I can’t imagine not having my yearning, not having the life I live now. I thank my yearning, as painful and ambiguous as it was, for my precious, wonderfully joyous life. But back to the story.

I yearned to study birds. Sounds funny and eccentric and esoteric, no? But there you have it. I had no idea that there were people who actually practiced ornithology and got paid for it--I learned that tidbit later. So instead, I fed my crazy, maddening yearning with birdwatching trips and studying my field guide and peering through my binoculars at the White-throated Sparrows who mobbed my feeders every winter. That was the life I left in Louisiana in February 1990, when I went to Costa Rica on a birdwatching trip.

When we arrived at Rara Avis (a wild journey that deserves its own story), the owner of the reserve, Amos Bien, took one look at me and said, “Are you a biologist?”

“No,” I replied.
“Funny, you look like a biologist to me.”

I must have stared at him like he had two heads. He just smiled. All day long I walked around with that marvel inside me: I was a biologist. I knew it just as surely as I knew that my eyes are blue. The yearning had an echo, an answer. Finally, I knew the sound of my own name.

When I departed Costa Rica, I cried for two weeks.

One Saturday morning, sobbing in my bed, curtains drawn and miserable, the yearning inside me said, “Enough.”

I got up and dialed the phone. My heart was pounding and my hands shook, and not just because it was the first international phone call I’d ever made. When Amos answered, I blurted out, “When you said you’d give me a job, were you serious?”

The connection was bad and the delay was agonizingly long. “Yes,” he said.

Everybody thought I’d lost my mind. I was terrified. It felt like I was jumping off a cliff.

I didn’t even speak Spanish.

But off I went to spend six months in the Costa Rican rainforest. Where I became the resident naturalist at Rara Avis and learned to speak the languages of plants and birds and ecology. I got a divorce. Then I took the GRE and got admitted to graduate school.

Fast forward to 1993. I married my soul mate who just happens to be an ornithologist. In 1999, I graduated with my PhD in Biology.

There’s a lot more to my story (as you’ve probably guessed), but I’ll save it later. Just a little bit about uncertainty before I go. I’ve jumped off several cliffs since that luminous Saturday morning when I called Amos. I’ve learned that there are two sides to uncertainty. The one side is the place where you’re being tied in knots, standing on the edge of the cliff. Do I jump or not? Then there is the uncertainty that is absolutely exhilarating--this is the flying part. You do not know where you’ll land or how your wings will carry you. And it becomes joyous and wild and adventurous.

The truth is: we never know where we’re going or what will happen when we get there. Uncertainty is our constant companion. And our closest friend, should be choose to embrace her and learn her magic.

So Jonathan, how’d I do?

On Peace, Pregnancy and Productivity

Today's guest contributer is Brandy Walker. 

Brandy Walker is a digital pastor, and copy writer. On her blog, brandyglows, she plays with words to inspire real change and help creative entrepreneurs.

You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. When she's not working, she and her husband laugh until they cry, homeschool their 4th grader, and bake cheap, yummy sweets.

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For the past month, I've been sculpting my to-do list. My action steps. My things-that-need-to-happen-before-my-water-breaks plan.

Last weekend, contractions started to flow. I couldn't tell if they were merely Braxton Hicks or something more. But one thing was very clear. I wasn't going to finish that list.

It was Go Time. And I could almost feel my head clearing. Irene fast approaching, the storm in my brain dissipated at a remarkable level. I was not ready to give birth in my home. Yet. With a few simple steps, I knew I could be.

I looked at my husband, "I don't know if I'm going into labor. But in case I am, we need to do three main things to prepare and set my mind at ease."

He took a deep breath and waited, apprehensive. I wasn't sure if it had to do with the birth or what I might be about to propose (he's wary of my fantastical schemes). I cleared my throat and continued, "First, we need to create a birth plan. Then, we need to make a list of the essentials for the birth and go to get them as soon as possible. And finally, we need to clean up this house."

It was simple, a plan, the supplies and a relaxing environment. That's all I needed. Everything else could wait. How freeing.

As the evening wore on, my contractions subsided. It didn't look like we were having a baby that night. But still, he kindly helped me prepare for a peaceable labor. We constructed a birth plan that includes candles, quiet, prayer, the movie Chocolat (for early labor), what to do with our puppy when I reach active labor, and placenta encapsulation. We journeyed to Target the next morning and picked up cheap clear shower curtains, black trash bags, popsicles and the other things on our homebirth list. We're still in the process of cleaning up. I organized the laundry room, washed all the baby clothes. Our daughter dutifully shined the dishes.

It's Monday. No baby yet. And we may still have a couple of weeks. But for the first time in this pregnancy, I feel ready. And that is a gift from God.

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I really thrive on productivity. I love the feeling of scratching everything off my to-do list. Problem is, I often don't hesitate to add new tasks. Eventually the list becomes so large I can't hope to finish in a day, a week, or even a month.

I am a digital pastor and I write a lot on my blog about participating with God restoring Shalom - peace and wholeness - on earth and within ourselves.

Tara asked me if I would write this guest post more than a month ago - and I was thrilled! I have such deep respect for her - both as a Productivity Maven, and as a dear friend. I promised to get it to her much sooner than I could deliver. As a result, I've been racked with guilt. She's been very gracious, but I feel very bad.

When I didn't go into labor last weekend, I allowed myself a (slightly) longer list. And I included this piece, realizing how important it was for me to keep my word. Her request meant a lot. Finishing this was one small way I could restore Shalom inside my being.

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This pregnancy has taught me a lot about being gentle with myself. I am an anxious soul; I need frequent reminders that God loves me; that it's going to be okay;  that I don't have to cross everything off my list right now.

Prayer, meditation, gratitude, hot bubble baths, reading to my daughter: these are some of the many Shalomy tools I use to put peace in my heart. Just taking a moment to breathe slowly and intentionally can do wonders to brighten our day.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you love productivity as much as Tara and I do. For the sake of our wholeness, may we all take a few minutes to figure out what we need for Shalom today. And then, let's do that. When we return to our work, we just may find our lists seems much more doable.

 

Good Morning, Mary Sunshine

I feel like death warmed over this morning. I do not use this phrase lightly, having just laid a beloved one to rest but no other wording comes close to describing how yucky I feel after another night of insomnia. And even so, I’m better than I was.

I know how bad it got because as I’ve gotten better, friends have confessed to me just how worried they were. “You weren’t yourself,” they say. And they are right: I was some golem version of me. I visited that dark place that St. Teresa of Avila talks about--the outer spiritual mansion where all the slithery things live. And this is why I joined the millions of Americans who take antidepressant medication.

I do not tell you this lightly.

I could go back to writing the kinds of posts I was writing before my dad got sick. After all, I have a reputation to maintain. Right? You’d never know what’s going on behind the curtain. Lots of people do that and they get along just fine. And they look great doing it. Upon closer inspection, they also look just a little artificial. Nobody is perfect and attempting to maintain some image, whatever that image might consist of, means that you’ve got to resort to botox and other toxins.

But when I think about pretending to you that I’m not who I am and not how I am, it makes me nauseous. My daddy, God rest his soul, raised me to be honest. Anything less than full disclosure in my dad’s eyes was a lie. I don’t totally agree with his take on that but he sure as hell scripted me very deeply in what being real is. I am, in the end, my father’s daughter.

And I will not be going back to writing trite little tips and tricks posts. I just can’t. I was sick of them before all this hell I’ve gone through (and trust me, you don’t know the half of it). I’d been trying to figure out how to come out from behind myself for months. And then sadness and grief did that for me. Stripped me naked, it did. Woohoo.

So if you’re looking for a productivity guru who pretends like she’s got it all together all the time, then you’ll be happier following Plastic Productivity Pollyanna. (Notice that I resisted the temptation to put a link under that moniker. Points for self-control.)

On the flip side, if you want The Productivity Maven: somebody who knows how to drink beer and eat crawfish (and for the record, I don’t suck the heads), somebody who can get dirty, cry, laugh, be serious, have fun, cuss; a woman who works hard (sometimes too hard), plays hard, is not afraid of long hours, is techy and smart and geeky and cerebral and earthy, maybe even a little bit of a smart ass, then I’m your girl. I’m more like a good craft beer, let’s say--complex and a little hoppy (I try to keep my IBUs in check).

Oddly, I am reminded of Thomas Merton.

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Amen and amen.

A guide to the care and feeding of someone in grief

After my dad got sick, I took an unusual interest in topics like death and dying and grieving. In reading numerous blogs and various articles, I encountered a sort of snarky arrogance in some of them. Especially the lists that are meant to inform the reader on what not to do in the presence of the sick and the suffering and the grieving. These posts are sometimes lauded as “sensitive” and “helpful.”

To this, I say: Bullshit.

In keeping the grieving person safe from whatever perceived harm that might occur, would-be encouragers and kindly supportive friends are turned into paranoid, timid, and sometimes dumb-as-a-post ghosts. Like the very sweet podcast listener of mine, who began his email of kindness to me with the phrase, “I hope it’s not too presumptuous...”

To this I say: Lawdy mercy. Of course not!

Here, I confess that I’ve become an addict on the nectar of human kindness. I’ll take any expression of sympathy, support, or encouragement I can get, no matter how awkwardly expressed it might be.

“I’m sorry.” Yes, me, too.

“I’m sad.” Ditto.

“It’s part of God’s plan.” I don’t know if there’s a plan. Perhaps that is the plan.

“It’s God’s will.” I’d been praying fervently for God’s will to be done, so hallelujah! Answered prayer. Check!

“He lived a good long life.” Yes, indeed he did.

“It happens to all of us.” Again, yes. All things die; death is the great democracy.

So here is my advice to you or for anyone who encounters suffering or grief. Mine or anyone else’s. Show up and say you care. If you encounter some defensiveness, ignore it and be kind and loving anyhow. If you tell someone that you’ll pray for them and they snap at you, forgive them and be love for them anyhow.

Don’t fear saying the wrong thing--being silent is the wrong thing. Just say something, anything. Say, “May I give you a hug?” and then hug them while thinking “Love, healing, hope,” as hard as you can. Any loving expression that comes from you is the right thing. Yes, please resort to Hallmark; getting a card in the mail is such a wonderful event, like receiving rare butterfly or a delicate flower. Oh, and please do send flowers, too. Please do lie to me and tell me I look great or that you understand. I don’t and you don’t and yet we do. We are all in this together.

In your heart, you know what to do. Just do that. When the urge to reach out arises, answer it. You set in motion a cycle of kindness and healing and hope that is so much larger and more important that you realize. Don’t be deterred. Don’t give up.