Prologue
One summer day in 2006 I pulled up to the courthouse in Durango CO and presented the paperwork for my name change. It was final. I would no longer be Shannon Marie Carman. Abandoned at birth, not totally and not literally, but as a circumstance of emotional neglect and sometimes abuse, I intended to put the matter of Shannon, a product of fate, to rest for good. It wasn’t the name I wanted to get away from, it was something much deeper and core to my existence.
After years of searching for a name with meaning I settled on Mirabel. I just loved the way it rolled off the tongue. Two years prior I had given the name to a main character in a chapter I was writing about my marriage, which you will discover in the upcoming pages.
I have spent my whole life ascribing meaning to everything, but in this case, it wasn’t until my dear friend Susan Wooldridge, author of poemcrazy, suggested I name this book Mirabel that I looked up the meaning of the name: wondrous beauty.
I am not suggesting that I am a wondrous beauty but that my mission in life is to define beauty and find it around every bend, and curve especially in the most depraved of human states. Ultimately my purpose in life is to show how beauty exists amongst tragedy as evidenced by the wildflower growing just outside the raging dumpster fire. How utterly perfect that without knowing it I chose a name for myself symbolic of my purpose.
During the same conversation we named the book, Suz and I entered a debate about whether I am “a writer”. I was on the fence about it, she was mostly convinced but I argued heavily that especially compared to her, I am not.
I identify more with the main character than that of writer; living, gathering experience, divining meaning from the dharma and finding beauty in the cracks is my style. It is the journey that captures my attention.
Writing is collateral. I record randomly in fits and starts and store it all haphazardly in archives, inotes, and even in academic papers. For the purpose of this book I have had to extract things, beat the dust off, and coalesce word-drift into common themes so it flows. I warn you now this will be a bumpy, non-linear search for meaning in the ordinary life of a middle aged woman.
Everything you read in these pages is real or symbolic of reality and moves between past and present. Both are subjective renditions. Both are true. The present moment writing is also subjective, written and interpreted the only way I can, through the lens of my own conditioning which illuminates what is relevant in any given moment and leaves out infinite co-existing truths in the multiverse.
I, like this book, am composed of many genres: allegory, adventure, self-help, horror, and trashy romance colluding to make up one almost fully functioning human. My intention in writing is that we share an adventure on the journey to belonging, as if you were with me on a cross-country road trip, telling stories and bridging gaps with insights sung at the top of our lungs while our feet swim in sandwich wrappers and our sleeves stick to sweet coffee smears on the console.
This is an invitation to unpack your mess and fly along with me beyond the pale… “outside the jurisdiction of authority” to celebrate the folly of being human. We will stumble into chambers of bliss barely lit with the blasphemous light of our cell phones when we wish we had a candle. We will become feral and touch the wildness that exists deep inside, beyond what the ego says is polite and politically correct. Rumi said it best:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.
