Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

July 11, 2017

Summer Sabbaticals and Starlight: An Invitation by Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

Mornings were always my best writing time. I woke early, predawn when my children were young, putting the kettle on for tea and sitting down to write before they were up, in that blueblack space between sleep and wakefulness. By the time our day began, I had already covered miles of inner terrain and created whole worlds as they dreamed.

Now, those children are teenagers and I find myself with my phone in my hand often before I even get out of bed, checking weather, then email. From there, I usually click over to Facebook to see if anything big is going on or if I have any messages, likes, or comments, and finally over to Instagram for the same, before going downstairs and scrolling while the coffee brews and the cats brush against my legs, waiting for breakfast.

Now, I try to write, get bored, and look something up. I try to write, feel stuck, and go watch an inspiring TED talk to get me motivated. I try to write and someone invites me to an event on Facebook and I reply and check to see who else is going, clicking on old friends’ and acquaintances’ profiles to see what everyone has been up to, and I am lost down the rabbit hole again.

Bingeing on social media and Internet use is very much like issues with food. There is a hunger without a name gnawing at the hollow of the belly. It isn’t a physical hunger, though. It comes from a need for pleasure, comfort, and distraction from our boredom and our often difficult modern lives. It is escapism. It seems positive or essential–I need food–I need connection to others. But, the food is largely junk, full of sugar and chemicals we can’t pronounce. Much of social media is largely junk, too, full of memes, quizzes, and links to funny cat videos.

I want to say, as clearly as I can, that I am not bashing any of these things because I laugh at the memes, take the quizzes, and watch those videos on a loop, too. I do it every single day and I enjoy some aspects of it. But, when I find myself avoiding my writing or my feelings of boredom or loneliness by clicking back and forth between the carefully curated and sponsored Instagram people’s perfect lives–or, taking a quiz to see what kind of tree I would be, yet again–I think it is something worth pausing to think about.

What, exactly, am I getting out of this but a very temporary fix that relieves the boredom, but also simultaneously hooks me into ever-increasing consumption?

Last September, my partner and I spent a long weekend in a tipi in upstate New York, in a location where there was no Internet and no cell phone service at all. After a few hours of strange technological deprivation anxiety, it slowly ebbed away. My phone went into a backpack, turned off, useless. We wandered long gravel roads, talking without pausing to so much glance at a text or even to break the moment to take a picture of the foxglove blooming wild alongside the road or the streams cutting across the jagged hills. We lit campfires, a slow meditative process of making fire. We lounged in a hammock, our feet tangled together along with our words. He napped and I wandered into a sun-drenched meadow ringed with wildflowers.

There, I spread a blanket on the ground, opened a book, and let my body sink into the earth, light spilling over me. I dozed and read until the sun set, then he joined me there and we watched the stars emerge, one by one, excitedly pointing each out as it revealed itself in the gathering darkness. He sat behind me, arms wrapped around me, and I felt like we were the only two people in the whole world, watching the celestial performance the sky put on just for us.

Would we have had the same experience if we were together in that field illuminated by the glow of our respective cell phone screens instead of starlight? Would our excitement and presence in the moment have been as powerful if we were streaming our favorite shows and checking work emails or quickly popping in to see what our friends were up to on social media? I already know that the answer to this, for me, would be no.

More recently, I attended a writer’s workshop and residency at the Millay Colony, again in upstate New York, and again minus cell phone reception. Though less isolated than the tipi weekend (some wifi was available here and there), I opted not to go online for more than twenty minutes per day. That was it. All email, social media, and news had to get done in that time frame or it didn’t happen.

I was ruthless in enforcing this. I didn’t waver or make exceptions.

What I did was take long walks and stare out my studio window. I read books. I napped. But, mostly, I wrote…and wrote…and wrote. I wrote in the workshop intensive with two different instructors. I wrote in bed. I wrote outside on a rock wall in the sun. I wrote sitting on a bench in the middle of the woods at the grave of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. I filled an entire notebook of over 120 pages in just five days and I did so because I disconnected from the Internet and connected to my fellow writers there and my own creativity.

While I was at Millay, I was already thinking about the ways my unplugging was an antidote, a remedy, a heady dose of good medicine for me. I also was feeling shame that I was unable to better manage my online consumption and addiction to these distractions. Then, other writers there confessed that they’d disabled their wifi, too, hoping to escape it. One workshop facilitator, a brilliant, award-winning writer I admire deeply, talked about her internet addiction and how she had to write her latest book in her car parked down by a river in her hometown because it was the only spot where she couldn’t get Internet on her phone or laptop. This same writer told us how she just built herself a studio at her home, one positioned where it is because she trekked around the property until she found another Internet dead-spot and said to the builder, “Here–I want it built right here.”

Listening to her talk about this, I felt a clear truth rising through me, a voice, “See, you aren’t the only one!” echoing through my consciousness.

Maybe you have a stronger will than I do. Maybe you only use social media sparingly and it doesn’t impact your time with others or your creativity or your emotions. If so, these words aren’t for you. I have deep admiration for your discipline and clarity and aspire to the same myself. But if, like many of us are, you’re more consumed by your online life than you feel is good for you, I invite you to consider a summer experiment of restoration and renewal by pulling back from the Internet and sinking more fully into your world offline.

You may not be a writer, but you might be an artist, a baker, a long-distance runner, an animal rescuer, a gardener, an activist, a volunteer, a reader, a parent, a naturalist, a lover, a friend. Or, you might be nothing more than quiet, letting the empty space of what was Internet overuse become filled, instead, with contemplation, meditation, and healing.

As for me, I am going completely off the Internet grid every third day for the rest of the summer. No social media, no email, no online activity at all. I’ll answer calls or texts, but I likely won’t keep my phone right with me, so my responses will be slower and more intentional. On the other days, I will block off four hour chunks of Internet-free time, cut with brief 20-30 minute intervals of connection.

For some of you, my goal of unplugging and seeking renewal already looks like what you do, and it may seem trivial. For others, you feel an immediate rejection of what I am doing, an insistence that you absolutely must check email daily or social media hourly or the news twice a day–and perhaps that’s even true. We all lead very different lives and I have nothing to offer but my own experiences and inquiry.

But, as a sweet summer experiment, consider what would happen if you pulled back in any way you could from online life and got reacquainted with the life you’re actually living. Maybe you simply establish phone and Internet free zones or meals or times of day. Go out and fill some notebooks with the words only you can write. Spread a blanket in the grass with a lover and watch for stars. Let this summer be a time of renewal and return, connecting the scattered parts of yourself you’d lost in the Internet glow–finally, fully complete–radiating light, your own private constellation.

Restless. Sleepless. Book-lover. Wordsmith. Deep roots. Prodigal heart. Teacher. Guide. Wanderer. Witch. Tea, tarot, hot baths, stitchcraft. Curator of narrative relics, remnants, & curiosities.

Cat is also a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. Her poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in a variety of online and print publications. She has been teaching writing at the college level since 2000, and has facilitated creative writing workshops in elementary schools, high schools, prisons, and private organizations, as well as workshops exclusively for women to write their body and tarot-based narratives.

Through her Queen of Cups Tarot community, she offers private, group, and online tarot readings. Find her online at http://cdeliamulrooney.com and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/queenofcupstarot/

March 23, 2017

Word Medicine by Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

Weekend morning. I wake early and creep downstairs into the kitchen, setting the kettle on the burner and stretching my neck, my arms, my hands, shaking sleep off. Two cats circle like shadows around my feet, waiting for their breakfast–sleek and silent as the kettle starts its slow hiss and boil. Out comes the mug. The tea. My mind begins its checklist of the day ahead and the dreams behind. Because it is a weekend, the steaming mug travels back upstairs to my bedroom with me and I set it on the corner of my desk.

I settle myself in the chair, get the notebook and black ink pens out, and stare out the window, my breath a slow breeze through me. My gratitude is immediate as I rake my eyes across the neighboring field and distant tree line, still winter-stark and bare, waiting for spring. I let my eyes wander, cataloguing signs of the season shifting, watching for hawks and vultures drifting high, and geese who flock to the field all winter, their broken cries cracking the silence open wide. Squirrels erupt along the tree branches and the black cat from across the street stalks them for any misstep. Deer often graze when the field is high, bookmarking sunrise and sunset with their nervous energy. Foxes sneak past at dusk–but now, morning is just getting started and the scene is quiet but for a few crows circling, silent and black as the ink in my pen. My pen starts to move across the page. Meditation. Memory. Magic.

When it is warm out, the glass is thrown open, echoes of an old poem, “outside the open window, the morning air is all awash with angels.” Angels. Animals. And the first moments of peace I’ve had in days.

People will tell you to choose a job you love and you’ll “never work a day in your life.” But they don’t account for those like me who’ve chosen a job they love that makes them work harder than even seems possible. I am a teacher. My job is full-time, August to June, with those two infamous months off that many say make this career-path “easy” and me “lucky,” as if I am the one responsible for the academic yearly calendar. Yes. Those two months are wonderful. Like most teachers, I find them essential for recovering, recharging, and reflecting on the classes I had and the students I served all the best ways I know how. But, “easy” and “lucky” are not the words to describe how it feels to be responsible for the education of every single student who shows up in my classes with a whole history and agenda of their own.

I teach six classes this semester at the same community college I’ve been teaching at for over sixteen years now. I have 100 students I plan for, grade for, guide and (hopefully) inspire each and every day. I teach writing, so my job can’t be just assigning multiple choice quizzes or tests and calling it a day. I have the task of working with them on essays from brainstorming to multiple revisions, equalling hundreds of pages of reading each week. The emails are endless, as are the questions. I have no teacher’s assistant or co-teacher. This is a one-woman show that runs all day every day, and a couple of evenings, too. I am overwhelmed daily. I am also inspired daily. Impressed. Moved. Full of love, concern, and hope. When I leave campus each day, my bag is full of things to grade or long-range plans I am hoping to work on in between meeting the needs of the three young adults I am a single parent of–also no assistant or partner there to share the weight–a one woman show running 365 days per year, 24 hours a day. Also a job that leaves me full of love, concern, and hope every day.

I have chosen the job I have and the children I have (not that I expected to be a single mom when my family began, but then, life is full of surprises). Both my work and my children provide me with the fuel of life I need to run on. But burnout, in both the role of teacher and of single mother, is a very real concern and is something I constantly have to work against to be the teacher and the mother my kids all need me to be.

This is where my weekend morning rituals come in. This is where the waking early, hot tea, writing at the desk, and staring out into that field must be. The first twenty minutes of my writing is just brain drain–concerns, struggles, and self-doubt about whether I am doing a good job at either of my beloved occupations. But eventually, I tap into that third vocation I am called to–the writer in me sings out, full-throated, still alive in me in spite of everything.
My weekend morning ritual of time spent writing does more than stave off the possible emotional collapse from my weekday demands. It allows me to access all of the most vibrant, powerful, alive parts of who I am.

I once imagined a life for myself where all I did was write, spinning out entire invented universes from the blooming tip of my pen. I’d travel at will. I would sequester myself in the woods or alongside a mesa or a mountain or beside a tide-heavy shore, living to create. Undisturbed. A Virginia Woolf Room of Her Own dream. I still have this fantasy sometimes. I’ll teach, but teach less. My children will grow more fully into adulthood. The writer I am will take up the space she’s due.

But even this dream only works when teaching, motherhood, and writing coexist. I, quite simply, couldn’t do without all three. Yet doing with all three is staggering. This contradiction frames my life and challenges me in ways only another person working within constraints like mine could ever understand.

The pressure, the ache, and the exhilaration of these three things have taught me the profound power of self care. For me, it looks like a quiet desk by a window overlooking a field full of life. What was a weekend morning routine has been infused with a significance that makes it sacred to me. Perhaps the only line between routine and ritual is how desperately the person needs it. My ritual renews me, offers me moments of grace, and fortifies me for another week of balancing everything. Weekend mornings are my ritual. Words are my medicine. I wake early. I brew the tea and open the windows when I can, looking for angels. I channel the determination of my students, the love of my children, and the power of my imagination to slip from the sunlit field in front of me into the wild expanse of my salvation–my flawed, imperfect writing life.

Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

Restless. Sleepless. Book-lover. Wordsmith. Deep roots. Prodigal heart. Teacher. Guide. Wanderer. Witch. Tea, tarot, hot baths, stitchcraft. Curator of narrative relics, remnants, & curiosities.

Through her Queen of Cups Tarot community, she offers private, group, and online tarot readings. Find her online at http://cdeliamulrooney.com and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/queenofcupstarot/

December 20, 2016

The Magic of Three by Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

Once a month, we meet up for coffee. Usually, the cup of coffee extends to several and then often pushes over into lunch. Words spill. The rise and fall of voices. Steady flow of conversation. One of us throws out a sentence into the currents and the others slip into the stream of thought. We tread back and forth around politics, personal life, art, culture, gender, racism, and the focus point for all of it is our shared creative life. We are writers. Women writers. There is a strange magic that begins to run its course when you find your allies—in our case, creative allies. There is a spark. Incantations in cafes. Enchantment over paper cups.

This starts to sound like the plot of a silly modern fairy-tale. It isn’t. I can say this honestly and plainly. I don’t know where I would be without these two women. But, I know that I wouldn’t be writing.

One of them is twenty years my senior. Elegant. A cancer survivor. Married. Mother of two grown children. Beautifully transparent with her feelings and her life. She writes a little bit of everything, but mostly we’ve been working with her novel—a historical/contemporary fiction piece about women searching for their own strength and agency. The other is five years my junior. Stunning. A survivor of a lifetime of struggle. Married. Childless. Guarded until you know her. Her writing also spans genre, but her masterwork is a novel that defies definition with a character who defies the entire world she finds herself in. Me. Tattooed. Divorced. Single mom of three teenagers. Guarded in most ways forever, but open in occasional moments that pass through like weather. My writing right now is mainly focused on a novel about women and voice, violence and the body, sanity and silence.

We have different ages, ethnicities, statuses, tax brackets, zip codes, experiences, bodies, and daily routines.

And yet.

When I am with them, I am able to sink into that part of myself that few people ever get to know. The dark thickets of my creativity. For every way we are not alike, there remains the common denominator that we are all females and creatives—identities that require more than just a little bit of magic to maintain.

We aren’t raised in a culture that values female friendships. Too often, women are pitted against one another in terms of their beauty, their sexuality, their success, their ability to appear “perfect” and desirable to the male gaze. Women’s primary role is seen as one in service to husbands, children, partners—so, therefore, friendships with other women become secondary at best. Then, as writers, there should be competitiveness and envy between us. I should secretly rally for their failure and my own success, jockeying in place to surpass their skills and publications. But, both of my writing friends had a book come out this past year—I didn’t. I was happy for them in a genuine way, knowing how hard they have worked, knowing that creative fortune favors the determined and they absolutely outdid me in their tenacity and resolve.

The paradigms about what women are like and what writers are like are completely fragmented by my relationship to these two people.

Magic is defined as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces…wonderful; exciting…to create, transform, move, etc., by or as if by magic.” The word is one I wouldn’t use lightly. The word is one I would use for what we do when the three of us get together. We create a safe container to allow inspiration in. There is a known, friendly, supportive audience awaiting the words I manage to scrape free from my self-doubt and the insecure edges of my consciousness. My words move and transform and take shape on the page because I can trust that two talented women will receive them for me.

Somewhere in the ritual of coffee cup and notebooks splayed open wide and pens rattling around the tabletop, I know we are influencing our own course of events. Writing is a solitary art. It lacks the swagger of music, the ability to take up tangible space like visual art, and the approachable presence of the stage. Writers are often wildly introverted, so the idea of sharing writing in process—half born and half formed—(and then having to speak about it) can seem like a nightmare. With them it is, instead, a gift.

When I completed my MFA in Creative Writing, words left me. I found myself completely silenced by the intensity of the experience I’d just had and the requirements to work under such restrictive time constraints. My muse rebelled–decided to ditch me and my outlines and run off to Hawaii to drink rum and weave red blossoms into its hair while befriending tropical birds. I couldn’t blame my creative voice for skipping out, but it was painful. I could still occasionally chisel an essay or a poem from the stone block I was living with, but fiction, my wild-eyed sidekick, my first love, had left me.

My notebooks filled with heavy black lines, crossing out whole universes. Voices rose in me then fell quiet like awkward guests at a party, drifting by the punch bowl with nothing to say and a thirst that could not be named. I doubted everything. Especially myself. I was certain that any skill or talent I may have had was spent on a thesis novel that sat like a stone on the page, unyielding. A dead thing. A dead end.

And, that may have been the end of the story right there. The MFA curse come true. Student loan debt. A powerfully transformative experience and then it was over. No promise of success. No clear path forward. But, then, two years into my creative exile, the three of us started meeting up in cafes and emailing our work to one another. Each of them had a longstanding novel in the works for us to begin with. I was untethered from my thesis and wanting to start something new. After a few false starts, I did.

Slowly, with the support and encouragement of these women, a new novel stitched itself together. While it did, my muse started to hear our conversations as she skinny-dipped beneath a bone-white moon. She noticed that I was recommitted to the work again once I agonized over and then scrapped almost two-thirds of the novel, but didn’t give up. I told my writing group members of my plans and they didn’t recoil in horror that I was going to cut so much–they agreed, offered support, and told me to keep going. I am, I told them. I will.

Those words magically brought my muse back to me. She came home not wanting to talk about her time of sea and sky, but watching patiently to see if I kept showing up for the work, even when it felt impossible. I did. I am. But, without our monthly meetings and the emails, texts, and calls, I can tell you in no uncertain terms, I wouldn’t be.

The cups of coffee cool on the table at the cafe. We have spent the morning discussing one another’s work and our next steps. I walk into our meetings with that low-level anxiety creative women know all too well–how dare I say that, how dare I share that, how dare I put that on the page or paint it or photograph it or sculpt it or sing it or let it out into the light? Who am I to take up so much space?

You’re one of us, my writing women tell me. That’s who.

Audience. Friendship. Support. Creative sisterhood.

Read us what you’ve got. We’ve been waiting to hear your work.

Words more magic than these may never be spoken.

Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

Restless. Sleepless. Book-lover. Wordsmith. Deep roots. Prodigal heart. Teacher. Guide. Wanderer. Witch. Tea, tarot, hot baths, stitchcraft. Curator of narrative relics, remnants, & curiosities.

Through her Queen of Cups Tarot community, she offers private, group, and online tarot readings. Find her online at http://cdeliamulrooney.com and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/queenofcupstarot/

September 20, 2016

True Wise Tales of a (formerly) Broken Heart by Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

The first was in junior high–we wore matching outfits to a Valentine’s Day dance one week and he broke up with me the next. I was home sick with a flu and in my fevered, delirious state the heartbreak felt like ruin. No gift. No lesson. Just I feel something for you…no, wait, I don’t. The End.

Then there was a boy who called me beautiful and talked to me for hours on the phone each night, only to pass by me in our high school hallways like a ghost by day. Another whose popular girlfriend found out he was talking to me in biology class and decided to make me regret ever speaking a word. I was just as heartbroken over her as I was him–I wanted to be her friend, too. I failed. I learned a new kind of pain brokered by the power differential between certain types of girls.

Next came the real one. The first true love. The everything. We spent hours deliriously kissing and hours wildly fighting. Two kids mimicking the broken marriages of our parents and dealing with grown up issues we were ill-equipped to handle. As deep as the love was, I learned that love isn’t always enough–a lesson it took years to fully understand.

By the time I fell for the man I’d marry, there had been other splintering heartbreaks. A New England musician who wrote me love letters long after he left and another girl’s boyfriend who scarred me in a dozen different ways. In those days, I could feel love for the infinite potential of a fragile boy strung out on drugs or a poet I barely knew who called my shoulders white as milk and swore he’d never kiss me or we’d both die from it.

My heart then was a fool and I learned to let it break wide open to hold everyone and everything. Limitless. Boundless. Vicious.

But, when I married, I thought I had found out what love actually was. All that it could be. My fairytale ending. The babies, the house, the growing up together year after year, our late night philosophical ramblings and our barefoot slow dances to Harvest Moon across the warped kitchen floor, our fights and our forgiveness.

One day, as we stood together in our sundrenched kitchen, his wedding band snapped and fell off of his finger. “It’s a sign,” I said ominously. “It’s not,” he said, shaking his head. We both stared at the silver band, no longer a complete circle, no longer whole.

I was right. We separated a year later.

I was given a lesson then in a whole other level of pain no one ever could’ve warned me about. Heartbreak to end all heartbreaks. I won’t say that my divorce made my heart wise. I can’t say that. If anything, it made my heart even more completely lost. If “forever” didn’t exist anyway, my heart decided to pin itself to reckless stories that would only cause more damage–the only thing I understood. A heart, once set to broken, draws in other fractured hearts with a magnetic pull.

I went out with a man who belonged to someone else, a teacher who took me to a prom but couldn’t kiss, a Buddhist I didn’t like but whose philosophies I did, a writer who didn’t want me to talk about my work, a chef who didn’t like my tattoos and asked if I’d consider lasering them off before I met his family. There was one I believed might become my next something, but my brokenheart perspective had a nasty habit of shifting into kaleidoscopic view, seeing only the smooth parts I liked, while shifting the glass to obscure the jagged-edged ones I did not. I spent so much time pressing my eye to the shattered fragments that I overlooked the blood spilling from me. I believed that wounding was all I deserved after all that had happened.

I was still a damn fool.

Then, my mom died of what was ultimately a broken, faulty heart and I realized that my greatest source of love had never been the dates or the crushes or even the real relationships–it had been her all along–and she was gone.

There was no choice but for me to channel all of the love I had left into myself.

I bought myself a silver ring at the same shop where I bought my ex-husband’s years before. I went to the beach and vowed to stay alive and to stay open to love in all its forms. I vowed to make better choices to stop my constant heartbreak. I wrote my vows in the sand and let the waves carry them off. I slid the ring onto my finger and the wisdom of all I’d been through surged in my blood like high tide.

My marriage to self-love was in March, and that June I did meet another someone. He had a faulty, broken heart not unlike my mother’s.

When I eventually let him close to me, I could hear the mechanical ticking of his clockwork heart, keeping time. He’s had many surgeries in his life and and I’ve had many wounds. Our hearts both know something of suffering.

But, I have been wise enough to start to let my past go and to count each moment with him.

I don’t know what the future holds and, yes, he may yet be another hard lesson learned someday, but over the past three years, I have been learning my way around love, not loss. I have been learning to receive, to be heard, to be seen as beautiful and worthy of respect and tenderness.

My heart has been burned and my heart has been broken, but it was the wisdom I earned through self love that led me to a place where I am even able to have this kind of partnership now. This isn’t a fairytale where a hero rides in and saves our lady from her sorrow–it is one where she rescues herself and loves herself first.

The bravehearted partner is definitely a bonus, but the real love story…now and ever after…is the one within.

Cathleen Delia Mulrooney

Restless. Sleepless. Book-lover. Wordsmith. Deep roots. Prodigal heart. Teacher. Guide. Wanderer. Witch. Tea, tarot, hot baths, stitchcraft. Curator of narrative relics, remnants, & curiosities.

Through her Queen of Cups Tarot community, she offers private, group, and online tarot readings. Find her online at http://cdeliamulrooney.com and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/queenofcupstarot/