Rediscovering the void

It seems like- in the long ago- that life would happen in big ways and small ways and I would write about it. I always had something to say. About walking the dog or washing the floors or spotting the latest outfits the stone squirrels in my old neighborhood were wearing. There really was nothing too insignificant to document. 

But that was then. Now here we are. Months and months of big and small happenings. And a blinking cursor on a blank page. A void.

I can’t think of words. I can’t even think of thoughts. Putting words to thoughts is how I’ve framed my time on this plane since I was little. I’ve long found solace in words, comfort in the way they provide answers or reassurance to the sad, scary, or infuriating things. How they allow me to cocoon the joyful minutiae of my life. Words are the fuzzy blanket. The hot cup of coffee. The afternoon with my sisters. The night spent looking at stars, when I haven’t looked at stars in a long time. Words are the steadying hand. The streetlights guiding me home. Who am I without them?

It could be that now is not a season of my life for writing. That is something people say, right? This isn’t the season for this or that. The seasonality of our circumstances. The reassurance that it’s always shifting. The forgiveness for all the things left behind or ignored. The garden beds left to the weeds. It’s not a season of my life for writing because I’m the mother of three, I’m in grad school, I work full time (during the school year, which is now mercifully finished), and I’m preparing for my first year of teaching, during which I’ll teach other people how to write. I understand it seems logical, given my love of reading and writing, that I’ll be teaching English, but it also seems sort of insane, given my pretty significant lack of teaching experience. 

It’ll be fine. Right? Sure. Let’s just say it will be fine. I mean, it still feels both a little surreal and a little absurd that I’m going to be in front of a classroom next year. That’s the season, though. Surbsurdity. Or Absurrealism. Or something. 

As one of my co-teachers this year said up until the very last lesson, “we’ll get there.” 

For the past decade writing has given me a sense of purpose. A sense of coming home. So It is unsettling to sit down to a page without a plan. To feel as if the thoughts are just too tangled, too dense. Too lost in the busyness of the current day-to-day to be sorted and shelved. To perform any alchemy of meaning or resolution or connection. It’s unsettling. But also, given the context of the past year, probably inconsequential. 

Last week, a student told me that a family friend had overdosed in a grocery store. “His friends didn’t want to get in trouble,” the student told me. “They just left him there.”

Two weeks ago, the first friend I made since returning to Virginia five years ago told me that she’s moving across the country. And I know she’s following her own peace and I’m happy for her. But I’ll miss the ease of our conversations. We’ve spoken the same language since day one. Her daughters are my daughters’ best friends. You should see them tumble on top of each other like littermates.. Jovie wailed when I told her. Lily’s freckles were magnified by her tears. I’m so tired of delivering bad news to them.

Two months ago my husband had a heart attack on our living room floor. “Take care of Annie,” I told Jovie. “Put the dog outside and watch the cats,” I told Lily.  I called 911. As I gave the dispatcher details about the paleness of his face, I told him to stay awake. To listen for the sound of sirens.

“They’re almost here, they’re close by.”

Weeks before that I walked with a close friend on an impossibly pretty early spring day as she retraced her little sister’s last steps. The following Sunday, I went to her sister’s funeral.

Months before that I texted a friend who had to evacuate the press gallery at the  U.S. Capitol during an insurrection. 

Some of these happenings were only mine to witness, not to claim. I know it’s not the same burden. At the same time, the way that they’ve rearranged my ideas about life- from my day-to-day comforts to my worldview- feel significant. 

What’s more, I should have more to say about all of these things. I should have novels. But instead I have these recitations. Like beads on a rosary. The quiet click to the next tragedy or disappointment or catastrophe. The next bit of sadness.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end …

That it is not my season for writing feels like a small death in comparison to the seasons of upheaval I’m witnessing around me in the past year. 

Friends who have lost a parent. Friends who are losing a parent. Separations and divorces. 

There’s also new babies, job changes, moves. So many people just treading water. 

Ugh. All I do anymore is list things.

It feels as if there is a changing current under all of this. Like sands shifting on a dune. Or a continent reshaping itself. It feels bigger than all these little earthquakes. Like we will step back in 50 years and see how this year eroded the landscape so completely. 

How the boundaries of our being have been reshaped.

It’s all so painful in the process. I think that’s why I’m frustrated to have not spent time with it. How I’ve just focused on getting through the days. Making the lunches for the kids. Reading the next chapter in my textbook. Traversing the middle school hallways. Vacuuming the carpets on Fridays. That’s what the last six months have been about. Running, running, running, running, then crashing in my bed. Then repeating. 

Meanwhile all these people I know well or just a little bit facing down traumas and tragedies. 

It’s the first week of summer break and I’m just now trying to loosen the knots in my head. To lay out how scary it was to see Brad wheeled out of our house on a gurney. How unbelievably sad it was to sit with my friend as she mourned her beautiful sister. This force of a woman gone much too soon. How chilling it was to see Confederate flags waved in the Capitol building and how disheartened I was by exchanges I had in the days that followed. 

We have this idea that our skin is the barrier and the vessel for all our vital parts. Maybe this year was meant to thicken it; instead I find myself wondering how much it will contain before all my vital parts begin spilling out.  

So today I’m writing in hopes of shoring up the walls.

I just started reading  “Underland: A Deep Time Journey” by Robert Macfarlane– a book exploring the lands that lie underneath our feet. It’s absorbing and fascinating. In it, he writes about physicists, searching for evidence of dark matter, deep underground. They retreat to subterranean laboratories because there is too much noise on the surface. Too much stuff, too many distractions. To search for evidence of something that has never been seen, but is believed to exist requires a void of sorts.

“To perceive matter that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence,” Macfarlane writes.

I find myself envying these underground researchers peering into the birth of the universe. Not the claustrophobia or the literal weight of the world overhead, but the solitude. The quiet. How contained they are. The opportunity to be singularly focused on discovery. On unearthing things of consequence. What those researchers are positing  is that just 5 percent of the universe’s mass is made up of things we can touch with our hands or see. Sixty-eight percent of the universe’s mass is assumed to be this “enigmatic force” called dark energy; the last 27 percent is dark matter. 

How inconsequential this tangible world with all its aches and pains starts to feel. 

Regardless, here I am. Impatient for the big picture now. What all this ugliness was for. What the strata of this year looks like from a geologic perspective.  I don’t want to wait for the revelations. I want to know. Why? 

I’m listening to “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 

She shares revelations with me while I do the dishes.

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy,” she soothes.

In her quiet reflections on our human interactions with the natural world, on humans being of the natural world, she reminds me to relax. To watch and listen.

So I noticed when Annie squatted down in front of a patch of clover next to the sidewalk. “Hello, Mrs. Bee,” she chirped. “Hello!” My wonder. My joy.

Kimmerer reminds me of our interconnectedness. How all of this hurt radiating from just about every person I know is something we all carry together. She reminds me of the mutualism of forests. How the trees see each other through good times and bad times. Feeding one another because they see the bigger picture. 

“The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.”

Given all we’ve witnessed the past year, it’s easy to feel as if humans are damaged. As if no good can come of our time here with our greed and destructive tendencies. The last year feels as if some sort of divine retribution or comeuppance for all our bad habits.

One of my students would certainly agree.

“Humans are terrible for this planet” he told me all the time. He lamented the homeless and the hungry with such earnestness and righteousness. He told me that everybody should be able to feed themselves regardless of how much money they had. 

“It’s wrong!” he would say over and over again. “It’s wrong that there are people who don’t have enough food.”

And he is exactly right. And he is a reminder of the people we were born to be before we grew up.

The trees feed each other. Especially during the hardest months. They see the strength of the collective good. “What happens to one happens to us all.”

It’s the same for humans, I think. Though we don’t see it as plainly as the trees. It’s obscured by these wide chasms of disparity. When those among us are aching, we all ache, even though we might try to close our eyes to it. When there is injustice, insecurity, poverty, hunger- deprivation within a community of beings- it touches all of us. It makes us all worse off. Even for those who feel cushioned and sheltered and satiated. It affects our entire well-being. When we trade our comfort for someone else’s discomfort, we all lose- even when it seems as though one side is winning. There’s a psychic wounding. There’s metaphysical pain inflicted on ourselves for each act of physical pain we inflict on another person. And as we’ve witnessed through the lens of covid, it’s harmful to the health of our entire ecosystem.

There I’ve gone again, riding off on several high horses across a thousand tangents.

What a relief it is to be writing again.

Maybe summer is my cave. The fulfilled life is my dark matter. Maybe the peace that matters most is in the bumble bees. The dirt underneath my fingernails. The lemony magnolia. My daughters shrieking while running barefoot across the grass. 

“We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most,” Macfarlane writes.

For all those hurting hearts- my family, my friends, my neighbors, my colleagues, my students- and all those strangers whose troubles I can’t know, I’m sending  you tenderness. Find it in the gentle flicker of the fireflies and the trilling of the crickets. 

Remember, the wounded world is holding you, too.