As I went down in the river to pray ...
Why I write about hope
#caregiving
#woman in midlife
#Parkinson’s
#insomnia
#mental health
#spirituality
#healing
#hope
#longread
I don’t know if anyone wants to read about personal catastrophe in a newsletter about hope. But I want you to know why I chose this path.
I’ll begin with spring of 2024.
I’ve forced myself to walk to my favorite river.
My feet drag along muddy gravel. My eyes are cast down from the gray sky. A hoodie smothers my gaze, protection from a freezing drizzle. I’m inside my head, churning, tumbling, barely breathing. Despair, thick and dark and powerful, is suffocating me. I hate feeling this way, and that makes it worse.
My throat is clenched tight. I’m on the verge of crying, but I won’t allow it. I’m barely aware that my body moves below me. I’m so focused on this pain, emotions physically squeezing my chest, surging, flooding, slamming, choking me. It’s unbearable.
In a quiet corner of my heart, the spirit of my dear old dog Echo lets out a faint bark. The noise lures my awareness to the outside, the forest, the boulders, the sound of the river rushing. I pull back my hoodie. Echo is racing through the manzanita bushes chasing a chipmunk, like she did a thousand times when she was alive. Then she’s digging furiously under a fallen tree for the critter, and now her head pops up over the log, eyes wide, keeping track of me.
Remembering Echo brings some relief. She’s often here to greet me. I inhale. Cold mountain air seeps into my lungs.
I come to the riverside. She’s also an old friend whose every curve, tree, rock, and bush I know like the back of my hand. Though many of her features are constant, something is different each time I visit. A newly fallen log or a new patch of wildflowers. Snow in June. Or none in February. A freshly carved eddy. A collapsed bank.
When I come through the woods and peer down, she’s churning nearly out of control, violent and ready to overflow her banks. She’s at the peak of spring snowmelt after a big winter blessed with record snowfall. I can’t remember ever seeing her raging so mercilessly. Her immense flow of ice water rips willows from soggy banks and cracks logs against ancient granite boulders. Spinning, splashing whirlpools swallow and spit up froth and foam.
I’ve been to this spot hundreds of times. It’s briefly unfamiliar — a different face on an old friend. Magnificent, unfettered, and forceful, rather than peaceful. But she’s still my river. By fall, her waters always recede to a mere trickle. We eat picnics on the same gravel that is submerged under eight feet of roiling cold in spring.
I pause longer than usual to contemplate the river’s reflection of my inner state. I know she’s not always like this. At this moment, it dawns on me that how I feel won’t last forever.
How often we believe that we’re on a linear trajectory. Down. Or up. When usually the universe works in cycles.
Considering the river, realizing that it’s at the peak of a cycle, I remember a book. I flash back to my mom’s office. I’m a teenager. The space is sacredly tidy, dark blue carpet and light blue wallpaper with swirled paisley borders, and I’m reading in a loveseat that’s also blue, my mom’s favorite color. I’m curled up inside this sapphire of a room hunched over the “Tao Te Ching,” and I can’t grasp one thing about it. By this age, I must have encountered some things that didn’t make sense about life. My heart must have been broken or I must have observed some injustice in the world, and I’m looking through the book for answers. But it’s full of ridiculous contradictions. It confounds, confuses, leads the reader along and then flips them on their back. I read each stanza backward and forward and there’s the aroma of wisdom but I can’t quite taste it.
Those pages contain truth. Elusive, but present. The truth reaches out from decades past, trickling into my suffering mind, whispering, “Listen to the river.”
I remember reading in that sacred sapphire nook, looking for answers as a young observer of the world, puzzling over a stanza about water, trying to grasp its meaning. It’s been so long since I read it. What does it say about a river? I can’t recall. I vow to find that book.
For a few more minutes, I watch my friend the river abusing the willows, who usually stand tall at her banks but are now almost entirely submerged. Quite a few hold fast to the banks like superheroes enduring a flood. Their top branches whip back at the water in protest. They need to survive a few more weeks of this rushing water, and they will because they’re so flexible.
I step away. The cold drizzle stings my cheeks, but I leave my hood back. Though it feels impossible, I try to accept my despair, or at least hate it less. In this human body, it’s an emotion that’s as natural as a river swelling with spring snowmelt.
Many months later, I find the stanza about water:
“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard.”
~Lao Tzu, “Tao Te Ching” (verse 78)
Every night ends in sunrise
I’m my mother’s primary caregiver. She’s had Parkinson’s for 25 years. It’s a hard job. She’s fully cognizant but extremely accident-prone. I rescued her from a nursing home during the pandemic, and my life has never been the same. I’m a problem solver. Things keep breaking, and I keep fixing them. But some things can’t be fixed, and that can be hard to accept.
At one point, I tried so hard to fix everything, I derailed. Like “cat town” in Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84,” I entered a world where nothing made sense. The exit out of this world was not clear for a while.
To care for someone who is slowly dying, but very much alive, is to live in the in-between, a space of not-knowing. Circumstances are thrust on us. Many things feel out of our control. We say goodbye to our former lives while the future we once planned twists before our eyes.
Common advice for caregivers includes making sure to “care for the caregiver.” Parents learn this, too. The airplane stewards tell us to put our oxygen mask on first, before putting one on our kids. We’re told to take breaks, get help, exercise, eat right, rest, etc. As if there weren’t enough tasks already. But we can’t get away with ignoring that advice. When the caregiver isn’t cared for, everything breaks.
When nursing homes came under quarantine orders in early 2020, Mom became trapped without human touch. For many months, we could only visit her through a window. Nine months later, when we finally found and rented a big house that could fit us all and brought her home, she was 30 pounds below her normal body weight and couldn’t walk because of an undiagnosed broken bone. I expected her to die within a year.
Five years later, she’s still here.
She lives with me, my husband, and my daughter. Laughter fills the house frequently. But it’s a hard job.
That day at the river, I wallowed in self-pity and resentment. Regret. Disengagement. Paralyzing indecision. A deepening, darkening sense of loss and grief without the vaguest understanding of what I’d lost and what I was grieving.
This was all exacerbated by a decade of debilitating insomnia that began with the birth of my child. That night, driving home for many hours, despite my river epiphany, I still waged a fierce battle with despair — cheeks soaking wet, vision blurred with tears, hands shaking on the steering wheel. What could stop this pain? The answer flew by me at high speed. Despair almost drove me off the road.
A terrifying drive.
I didn’t want to be here anymore.
Good thing I also keep company with love, always.
I brought my family into my heart and made it home.
Insomnia, alcohol, caffeine, and prayer
I currently call myself agnostic. But I wasn’t always unsure. I’ve been exposed to many faiths and spent time in ashrams when I was a teenager. Before I was 15 years old, I’d experienced deep meditations, visions, and out-of-body experiences.
In spring of 2024, a little while before the river visit, I’d begun to think again about the divine and what its role is in our lives. I’d read Rainn Wilson’s book “Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution.” Rainn is a star comedian from the hit show “The Office,” so he wrote his book in a very lighthearted and accessible way. I wasn’t compelled by his arguments for the existence of God. They seemed elementary. But other aspects, particularly his ideas on improving mental health, stuck with me. He invited readers to come up with their own idea of the divine. I’d been in deep contemplation on this topic for several months.
The ashrams I spent time in were a sect of an ancient Indian philosophy known as Kashmir Shaivism, the same ashrams mentioned in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.” I’d grown up spending days at a time chanting “I am Shiva” with thousands of others, our voices rising like thunder, meeting a beat set by booming timpani. Shiva is the ever-unfolding consciousness of the universe. Shiva is not simply a deity but is the force of both creation and destruction. Reciting “I am Shiva” for hours on end is pretty convincing. Kashmir Shaivism also teaches the concept of Maya, a veil that’s draped over our perception as we live in these bodies, creating the illusion that we are separate from the universe. “Soul Boom” prompted me to consider these things again.
Rainn Wilson ends “Soul Boom” by imploring us to “live a purpose-driven life.” It wasn’t until I read those words that I realized how much I wanted that.
I’d come up with the idea of Earth Hope but hadn’t done much with it. I’m always thinking up big ideas. At that time, I didn’t know which direction to commit to, or whether I should try to be another corporate CEO’s writing lackey. That last option always left me feeling sick.
All this indecision began to cripple me.
At the same time, I wasn’t sleeping. And deep down, I knew why.
It only takes three days of insomnia to cause psychosis.
I hadn’t slept at all in those days leading up to the river visit and the terrifying drive home. I was so miserable.
As a result of this series of events — the soul book, the river walk, the epiphany, the drive home — an urgency overtook every cell of my body. I knew I had to do whatever it took to solve my sleep problem. Now. Many people depend on me. My resilience is their resilience.
I resolved to immediately stop consuming all alcohol and caffeine—coffee, tea, and (somewhat enormous amounts of) chocolate. I was so desperate, I also decided to cut out sugar. I bought multivitamins, magnesium, and ashwagandha (Indian ginseng). I’d tried other methods: “cutting down” on alcohol and caffeine, melatonin, sleep hygiene, strenuous exercise, gratitude lists, prescription drugs and yoga, all of which had failed. In my experience, gratitude lists are useless against insomnia-induced psychosis. (Truly, if you’re fervently engaging in gratitude listing and it’s not “working,” it’s time to take a deeper look at what’s going on.)
This frenzy of resolutions brought me to my kitchen window the day after I drove home from the river.
I leaned over the sink, washing dishes, twirling the sponge in the foam around and around a pot. I raised my gaze out the window. There was one more thing I could try. I’d never done it.
I prayed.
A very serious, sincere prayer. I peered out the window and said, “If you’re there, God, help me. Please.”
Deep breath. Choking back tears.
I know nothing of prayer. How does it work? I can see out that window right now, the moment my psyche formed those words. I begged the universe to send anything it could.
Grey light crept through fog, wet earth glistened, spring grape leaves dripped, bright green. A dull brown towhee splashed in the birdbath. Dish soap covered my hands. The river was washing them clean.
What is prayer? Is it the solidification of our intention? Does it align our free will with our heart’s desire? Is it when we brand ourselves with our wish, searing it into every cell of our being? THIS IS WHAT I WANT. Is it a love letter to our soul, which is also the universe, SHIVA, this ever-effervescent, manifesting consciousness?
I don’t know.
Such prayers of last resort happen when we find ourselves completely alone. There is no one left to blame. There is no one left to beg for help. When everything and everyone and every substance to which we have turned for help has resulted in rejection, shame, and dissatisfaction. It’s the dark night of the soul. The protagonist, left to wander a fogged and tangled wilderness, is forced to face herself alone.
Such prayer is a last-ditch effort. When we must confront our own self and free will. That’s why it comes out so sincere. There’s no other truth left.
I cut out the alcohol. I cut out the caffeine. I took the vitamins. I prayed.
And then I slept. Night after blissful night, I slept through for eight, nine, ten hours in a row. For the first time in ten years, insomnia left me alone. I felt 17 again.
It worked.
Relief. Healing. Rebirth.
There is nothing that is not Shiva.
— Kashmir Shaivism
Two weeks later, my mother broke her thigh bone. She bent over in her wheelchair, trying to pick something up, and the pressure of leaning over, the torque, broke her leg. A double compound femur fracture. Twenty-five years of Parkinson’s has led to serious osteoporosis.
Femurs are our biggest, strongest bones. Breaking a femur in two places is extremely rare. A compound fracture produces jagged edges that painfully shred surrounding tissue and endanger nearby critical arteries. Usually, it takes severe force, such as a high-speed car accident, to break the strongest bone in a human body — twice. The x-ray looked like three white knives laid side by side.
Before readers feel sorry for my mom, know that she experiences this world differently than you or I do.1 She’s a very happy person. She meditates and prays daily. She often rocks out to ’60s music. Unlike many elderly people with similarly challenging health conditions, she doesn’t live alone and receives loving touch every day, plus frequent conversations with her granddaughter. She was with me those years when we chanted, “I am Shiva.”
At the hospital, standing at the foot of her bed, my fingers cupping her toes, I said, “I can’t stand that you’re suffering like this again.”
And she said, quite sincerely, “I’m not suffering.”
I swallowed and let that sink in. How could we hold such different perceptions of the same reality? I realized how much I hated hospitals, how I distrusted anyone walking by. The doctors were already getting her medications wrong.
I had the uncanny feeling that this moment was a test, and the past wasn’t just the past but had always been preparation for the future. I was choking, but Mom was passing with flying colors.
I had the uncanny feeling that this moment was a test, and the past wasn’t just the past but had always been preparation for the future.
The femur broke in May 2024. I’d spent four years picking up the pieces of her shattered body, putting them back together, getting her up and walking, and nearly breaking myself in the process. And in one afternoon, it all crumbled again.
Here we go. Emergency mode.
As a reminder, the sequence of events is:
The despair at the river
The horrible drive
The resolutions
The prayer
The sleep and healing
The emergency
All my life, I’d been living these events in reverse, minus the prayer and resolutions. The emergency led to the lack of sleep, then to the misery and despair, burnout, and then a few seconds of rest. Round and round I’d go. Until collapse.
After she broke her leg, I spent three days catatonic. I learned later that this is a normal reaction to trauma. Then, I began to panic. I didn’t know if I could do it all over again after barely surviving the past. We’d already fixed hips and knees. This was not supposed to happen again.
Despair. Anger. Depression.
But even then, I slept through the night. A gift from the universe. Even though we’d plunged into emergency mode again, the world had lost its edges. The anxiety, irritation, and occasional psychosis brought on by severe lack of sleep were gone.
She’s fine now. I’m well, too.
She lives with me, my husband, and my daughter. We’re a motley crew who argue over politics and laugh together at the dinner table, bicker because we love each other, and keep each other from falling too low. We’re a family. Nowadays, Mom and I occasionally attend a progressive Methodist church, where she’s made a few new friends, folks of her generation.
How did I cure a decade of insomnia two weeks before another catastrophe? I’m certain the months that followed would have destroyed me if I hadn’t. I had to get my act together.
Because … what’s still to come?
I look at the sequence of events and I’m humbled and grateful. Pain is a blessing.
Was it God? The River? The Tao? Abstinence? Herbs and vitamins? Or the sheer grit of self-preservation? I know only this: When the universe offers a path to survival, take it.
When hope is the only direction you’re willing to turn toward
I call myself an investigator of hope. I’ve discovered that people who maintain hope are not typically those living easy lives. Something really shitty has happened to them, something that delivered humble pie, pushed them to the ground, and held them down, face in the mud, unable to breathe, soul throttled, until they thought they would perish. And then they blinked and saw a glimmer of light, a way out.
To meet hope, say its name, grab its hand, and wield it to get out of that tunnel of darkness.
These are the hopeful types.
I’ve also discovered that most religious people are into hope. I like that. I live with an atheist, another agnostic, and a believer, my mom, who seems to get everything she prays for. I’m not usually interested in whether someone believes in God, but if they believe in hope, I want to share their company.
The environmental community’s biggest self-inflicted wound is this raging debate about whether to talk about hope. Humans don’t achieve anything without hope. Permanent outrage is not a strategy.
If there’s any similarity between my experience and the stories I relay in this newsletter, it’s the astonishing ability of the human body and spirit to heal when cared for like a temple.
The animals and places I write about demonstrate the same resilience. The path toward healing is facing despair head-on, listening to it, then finding and clinging to gossamer-thin strands of hope. When things are that dark, you seize any light and pull. That is hope. Finding that it is taut and strong and will hold weight when tugged, hope is how we climb out of the pit of desolation.
My mother and I were broken in different ways, and somehow we both healed. Turns out, when you learn how to survive while doing the hardest job of your life, you end up stronger and wiser than ever.
As a result of this healing, and as part of a decision to live a purpose-driven life, I started this newsletter to elevate stories of hope that I didn’t see gaining prominence in mainstream media. At first, it was a way to survive in the in-between, creating something beautiful while I care for my mother. But the act of writing, and the response I’ve received — finding so many people who also believe in hope — has created yearning and momentum. I now know this will one day be more than a newsletter. I can’t help but brew big ideas.
I sometimes wonder if I’ve created a realistic impression of who I am, given all the positive stories I share. For a while now, I’ve wanted you to know why I’m here. How this happened. Where this hope came from. Yes, I’m enthusiastic. If I’m on your team, I’m the cheerleader. But hope and positivity aren’t the same.
Hope is a choice.
Hope is a verb.
Hope is hard work.
Hope is how you don’t go the wrong direction.
As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way!
O brothers let’s go down
Let’s go down, come on down
Come on brothers let’s go down
Down in the river to pray
— “Down to the River to Pray,” is a hymn that has been attributed to the “Slave Songbook of the United States,” an anthology printed in 1867. It was popularized by Alison Krauss in the 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou.”
If you’re a caregiver, I’ve created a publication called “Zen and the Art of Daughtering.” I’m still figuring out what to do with it. I might share occasional lessons learned or gather a community of caregivers supporting each other. Subscribe there if interested. Caregiving sons, spouses, parents, siblings, and friends are welcome.
Thank you for the help on this piece, David E. Perry (In the Garden of His Imagination) and Jordan Rosenfeld (Writing in the Pause). In addition to great writing advice, Jordan played a role in these events; she launched her newsletter on Substack that dark spring, and her decision was contagious. Thank you Julie Gabrielli; my interview with you last fall helped me think again about what I’d like readers to know about me. Thank you Joshua Ross for “Half shadow, half man” and these words: “The shadow I am wishes, like a drop of rain, to become a river again.” Thank you, Doug, for your post a while ago referencing in-betweenness.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS: Don’t miss this week’s bonus content at EYES on BEAUTY Thank you so much for joining this hope train.
About Earth Hope
Earth Hope is a solutions-based journalism project that highlights environmental success stories to inspire action. I’m Amanda Royal, a former newspaper reporter and current eco-news junkie. Read more about this project and what inspired it. I aggregate news under my “hopeful headlines,” conduct original reporting and interviews, and share occasional personal narratives. Visit earthhope.substack.com for more stories.
I’ve written about my mom in these pieces:
A patient new friend, in which I wrote, “And then something happened and I couldn’t do that anymore.” This is the story of what happened.
Amanda, I was active in your life, (I'm her mother) when this crisis happened in you. But I didn't know. I didn't see. I found out at when I read this article. I'm asking myself how I missed this. It's something I am giving a lot of thought.
I am moved to hear your story Amanda and appreciate the genuineness in sharing it with others. It’s interesting to know you learnt to meditate early on in life. It’s not always easy but gets you closer to the truth.