My Year of Blue
By Rebecca A. Eckland, M.F.A., M.A., M.A.
The first of many metaphor landscapes I mapped which represent what 2020 was like for me: a place and a time of isolation, tethered by doubt and surrounded by blue. All artwork by Rebecca A. Eckland.
In March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns rippled through Reno, the mornings were blue: a steady deep blue that cast spindly trees to black silhouettes with their bare branches. It was as if all the world were a bruise. I worked as a communications specialist at a local community college, and the preceding three weeks I’d written about nothing but COVID-19 as it swept across continents carrying disruption, death, and terrifying unknowns. Two years before, I’d put away my life as a competitive athlete even though I was afraid of what that would mean, resigned to live where the rest of the adult world seemed to thrive. I replaced podiums with desks and calendar invites, my fingers glued to a keyboard.
I felt grief for losing the biggest part of me, the me I had always known. The two-year-old me on the ski slope a year before my parent’s divorce, hanging onto my dad’s long and lean legs between his skinny skis, and other polaroids taken about the same time when my mom enrolled me in gymnastics. As I learned to walk, I also learned to move my body in more creative ways: pizza-pies and French fry skis on the snow; on dry land with cartwheels, forward and backward rolls, and a handstand when I gave myself my first broken nose, red blood rushing across my arms and hands. In those early years, I learned a lesson that I still cannot forget: our body speaks in a language stronger than words.
When we were all sent home in March 2020, I grieved yet another loss and another layer of my physicality: the shared spaces with others. A friend from graduate school messaged me what I didn’t know was a lifeline: a link to sign up for a certification program to become a Soul-Based Coach.
A healer, me? I wondered, yet two weeks later, I found myself applying makeup at 4 am for a Zoom training session with others from around the world who also wanted to become healers in a modality that combined yin-energy healing and symbolic modeling. I wondered if this was a world in which definitions of ourselves surfaced like light refractions on water, turning, changing over and over and over again, revising, ever new.
In the world of COVID-19, who was I in those deep, dark mornings of blue?
Very clearly, I was the voice of the college’s weekly COVID-19 bulletin—its safety messages, written in my voice but not my voice, disembodied, and speaking like an institution or a building, cut off from everything real and tangible in my own life. I was AP style. I was not even my own name, but rather nameless fingers that danced over a keyboard. Every blue and frozen morning I asked myself the questions: where had I gone? Where was I going?
And then there was the day in a 5 am training session when I was asked to answer the question: and when you are a Soul-Based Coach at your best, you are like what? I remembered a day when I was four and my mom and I had gone skating on the Davis Creek pond in Washoe Valley. I had felt lightness and joy, gliding on those skates across the smooth ice; how skating was a wordless way to turn the body itself into music—effortless and free, flowing from one note to the next, like a hawk high on the thermals.
When I am at my best, that is how I have always been: moving, flowing, and becoming. No matter what violence happened at home, I was the first girl picked for kickball, dodgeball, capture the flag, softball, baseball, volleyball, hopscotch, and even tag. No matter the terrifying trauma of the pain that red rubber ball or a fall on the pavement could deliver, I did my best to fly without wings. I caught, threw, dodged, ran, tackled faster, stronger and more violently than anyone, even in my black patent leather Mary Janes with their delicate strap that never broke and never came unbuckled no matter how much red-hot hurt I beat and ran out of myself.
As an athlete, my body was my refuge. When life went wrong, my body went right and I told myself I was a warrior. Years later, when a dozen MFA writing programs rejected my work, I entered marathons and won them. When the man I’d loved for seven years left me and the life we built for another woman, I turned to Ironman triathlons. When my book didn’t sell and and my partner embroiled in unending litigation from a former marriage that threatened to take my home from me and the deep l lonely ache much too deep and dark, I turned to ultra-endurance cycling where the pain on the inside rose to the surface as glistening sweat droplets, which I discarded on deserted highways for literally hundreds of miles.
Yet, in March 2020 there were no more races, no more starting or finish lines. Instead, practice clients from other continents peopled my nights and mornings in the Pacific Time Zone. Metaphor landscapes took me to vast and deep canyons, dark forests, wide meadows, and strong rivers to articulate those universal desires for love and acceptance played out in infinite ways—always different, always new. Yet the patterns of what and how we want as people remain the same no matter where we live.
As I continued learning, Zooming and practicing, all these metaphor landscapes—or others’ mental models of the way they perceive the world—not only opened out around me, but also within me. A large part of this work brought me back to myself, my body, the joy and the energy of possibility that it had once contained years before the violence, the trauma, and my unlearning of my own embodied existence. At first, stillness to meditate on my breath and the space around me. Then drawing my attention inward to where my body chose to speak: a pain in my knee, a twinge in my gut, a knot in my shoulder, wordless gestures to a body that had for too long been silent about its histories.
In a world of separate lives of the ongoing pandemic, I began to know myself, and I understood that the reasons why I had to run, to cycle, to swim and to dance—were all methods by which I moved through my pain, not as life’s martyr, but one if its survivors. This led me to the lesson symbolic modeling would uncover, something I have always known: love is deeper than fear. That new knowledge pushed me to join writing communities where my voice was accepted and safe; I participated in a virtual performance, re-learning how to skate and the memories of what the childhood version of me wanted to have happen. I wrote poetry about shattering and healing, roots and snow storms, waters wide, vast, and mysterious.
Moving forward in this new normal felt like I was on a small ship where my body also served as the main mast. It was up to me to withstand the gale-force winds I needed to carry myself forward to a new kind of life across a very wide, vast and lonely ocean.
In the words of Annemiek Van Helsdingen, who founded and runs The Academy for Soul-Based Coaching, our work begins by holding space, providing a safe container within which clients can begin to listen to themselves. This is amplified by the work of Caitlin Walker, developer of Systemic Modeling, who articulates most clearly the danger when we accept certain rules as universal ones, when they are really just perspectives. “I wanted to find the process for inquiring into one another’s experiences…without projecting our own internal worlds…I hoped that if I could find such a process then I could connect with other people in a more human way. I hoped that if groups could stop telling the same tales over and over again and consider what other stories were possible then we could make up new ways of being together”. This realization made me question my crippling fear of what would happen to me if I made a mistake. Perhaps my only mistake was my former belief that I was too flawed to even try.
As protests for racial justice came even to my hometown later that spring, I wasn’t yet ready to realize that I was teaching myself a new way of understanding and connecting: that it was not a way of knowing, but infinite “ways.” I simply spent my COVID-year witnessing the interior mental models that form our perceptions—our reality—each with its own strengths and blindspots. I witnessed this in other people. And then I witnessed this in myself. This is a process that happens in Soul-Based Coaching when the client notices that they are both the witness and creator of their own metaphoric understanding of the world—or in other words, of their own reality. In the words of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we become embodied subjects.
Blue became the thread connecting me to myself. Blue not only as mornings, but blue as lake. Blue as ocean. Blue as the memoir by Joan Didion—the one she wrote after the death of her daughter—blue as the color of Maggie Nelson’s poetry in 2014, the year my heart was broken. Blue as the kind of music that NPR plays on Saturday afternoons, the kind when I went to the grocery store in my mask among other masked strangers wondering when this world would become the one we remembered. Blue as my office walls at home, where I imagined myself as a cutter ship and my body as its main mast, taking the brunt of the gale force-winds to carry me forward in life—a strained balance and only just within my ability to keep myself from breaking open. And yet the bravery to just keep going.
I didn’t really advertise once I earned my certification as a Soul-Based Coach, but clients kept coming: people seeking clarity, wanting to know their next steps, how to transform and become better versions of themselves. Given the sheer number, I started my LLC, choosing a single hawk’s feather as my logo and the name “with wings,” A gesture of homage to the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe tribes whose lives history and artwork—their use of feathers as symbols of power, fragility, and flight— infuse my life and the place I live with complex meaning of what it meant to experience violence, trauma, and loss. Yet also: hope, resilience, and a connection to the deep mythical past into which our metaphors are rooted. In a time of social distancing, there was and is a way we are nonetheless connected.
No longer afraid, instead I became humble and curious. I asked the questions that compelled me when listening to what my clients said: And when it is like that, that is like what? And where is that? And where could that come from?
Then, I began asking myself these questions. For me, writing, coaching and existing in the world was like I was floating along the Truckee River—the river that runs right through Reno’s center—in an inflatable inner tube like I had long summers ago when I was kid, with my hands dangling into the cool, fresh water. Memories of my hands along the refracted light beneath the surface, only this time my hands would encounter words and ideas flowing along the river of life with me. We found each other, each on our own journeys, and the words would travel up my arms to my mind and heart and into the story that was slowly constructing itself above me.
I have come to believe that creative energy is, if not synonymous then at least synergistic, with the Shakti life energy that flows within us, through us and around us.
It is as rational as any mythical explanation I’ve heard, but my lifelong silence beneath the shadows of a podium melted beneath the blue where what it means to be a warrior and a healer merge, the deep dark blue where the stars shine the most brightly, guiding us home.
Photo by Laura Harstad.
Rebecca A. Eckland, M.F.A., M.A., M.A. is a professional nonfiction writer based in Reno, Nevada. She is co-author of the 2018 bestselling memoir A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America’s First Mental Health Court. She is also the ghostwriter for the 2013 memoir Cracked, but Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt by Kevin Hines, which has been printed in two editions, and is the inspiration for the 2019 film The Ripple Effect. Her work has been published in literary journals, including Animal: Beast of a Literary Magazine, Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Nonfiction by Z-Publishers, Hotel America, TAYO Literary Magazine, Weber: The Contemporary West, Sierra Nevada Review, The East Bay Review, The Meadow, and Mary: A Journal of New Writing. In 2017, her essay Mono Lake was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also a certified Soul-Based Coach and through her business, With Wings, LLC, she offers entrepreneurs, artists, and all those seeking clarity on their next steps in life and business support on cultivating their creativity and moving forward on their life journeys.
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