I Don’t Know What To Write About
January 2022, Day 7,477
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A slow Sunday:
Three pages, handwritten. Fifty minutes of yoga, shoulders and hips. Nourishing lunch, thank you my beloved Lindsay. Slightly too much coffee, what else is new. A meander around Golden Gate Park with Ashley, clouds pressed up so high, sitting and talking in the Aids Memorial Garden, the holiest cathedral. Off leash Tater, sprinting across the ball field.
(Note: I also shattered my Chemex across the kitchen counter first thing this morning—a rude awakening, indeed, followed by a prayer: May this be the worst thing that happens today).
I’m sitting here now, early evening, listening to the neighborhood erupt in celebration; without checking the final score, I know the 49ers just won. It’s growing dark, and so I’ve pulled all the curtains, except the one over my right shoulder. The full moon is a spotlight. Beneath the glow, my perspective shifts, broadens, expands. I remember my insignificance: sweet relief.
I sit still and cast out my antennae: what is floating around? What is weighing most heavily? What needs to be said, what might be even remotely helpful? What do I need to hear? What do I need to remember? Now the moon is a socket, calling me to plug in.
Here we are, still, again. I sit in my apartment with my dog and I go on lots of walks and I sweat and heave myself around in the gym, panting under the N95, and I go to the market and I wink at whoever makes eye contact with me over the mask, and, um, that’s about it. I talk (and walk) with friends about feelings, fears, fantasies, frustrations. The borders of what constitutes the external world are tight, known, familiar, navigable even with eyes closed. So, again, I plunge inward, giving myself over to the subterranean river, that dark and murky frontier that I no longer run from, so OK, fine, sure, let’s see what else there is to deal with.
We are treading water. This makes us stronger, sure. But if we are asked to do so for too long, we will exhaust ourselves. So, we float on our backs. We fashion a makeshift flotilla out of the wreckage that surrounds us, we take turns catching our breath. We heat another frozen pizza, we let the kids watch the iPad during dinner. We spend even more time on Zoom, heart emojis in the upper right-hand corner of our teeny-tiny screens a sorry substitute for a bear hug. We binge all the TV. We lock ourselves in the bathroom for some violent spurt-crying. We doom scroll, we binge watch. We make stupid little plans, we break them.
Our mid-brain whispers to our pre-frontal cortex: pssssst. PSSST! Hey. Hey hey hey. I know! Remember? Remember the thing? It will help. It will bring the relief you seek.
Pssssst.
*
There are moments when the antenna floats far into the future. I reach, feel, trace, sense, speculate, freak the fuck out. So I rein it in. This future tripping is followed by an immediate recoil, an abrupt redirect back to the present moment that feels self-protective. Current chaos is enough. It’s OK to not get ahead of myself, it’s OK to press pause on wading into the water of long term implications.
There will be another side, and we’ll get there, god/spirit/earth willing. In the meantime, the only thing I see is that I must be relentless with my commitment to the present moment. I must tend to what’s right here: skin, muscles, bones. Dog. Home. Hood. The angels in my orbit, who make me lunch and make me laugh and text me back and loan me books and with whom we trade freak-outs back and forth, taking turns allowing each other to float.
Tending to what’s right here also means taking responsibility for all the places inside me that I’ve been neglecting. I am confronted, y’all. I’m guessing some of you are, too. With so few external distractions, I’m tending to the inner garden. There are some seriously deprived patches in here! Rents in the soil that need care, someone to sing a little song over as they fill the wounds with nutritious dirt, maybe even plant a few seeds.
What else is there to do?
In elementary school, we used to play this (terribly named) game called Crack the Whip, where we’d string together holding hands, and the person at the front of the line would run and turn and circle around. Whoever was at the back of the line would be careened about by the force and momentum of the spin, often having to release the hand of the person in front of them as they were, well, whipped off the line. Right now, we’re in the spiral, right at that critical point where it reaches centrifugal force, and we’re all on the cusp of being pitched about into the ether. I want to be ready. I want to get to where we’re going. I am longing for everything I know is already on its way.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️Is it safe to fall apart yet?
⭐️Brain Space, Sweetness, and the Bern-Dog
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Crack the Whip. I think I am at the end of the line, every damn day right now. Thank you, Dani.
I like that broken Chemex prayer...