sobriety
holding a baby
drinking a glass of water
going for a walk
putting on my workout clothes, turning up the music and jumping on my trampoline
unrolling my yoga mat
meditating
broccoli
tidying up my studio, especially when I have a big deadline or just a regular pile of work to do
hugging my kids
turning on fairy/holiday lights
wishing someone safe passage on the road
a bath
listening to the ocean
watching a creek rush by
turning on some music and dancing
petting my dog
reading before bed
writing a three-line poem
waking up to see the sun rise
It’s spring here in the Northwest, albeit a few weeks later than usual. The camellia next to my front porch bloomed nearly a month after she normally does, and our daphne are only just now budding. A rosemary and two lavender plants (so hardy! so long-established in my garden) seem to have succumbed to the cold this year. But the daffodils have popped, and the tulips are close behind them. Our plum tree bloomed and has begun to shed its brilliantly delicate blossoms. It feels somewhat dramatic to write this (although, probably not after surviving a pandemic), but these signs of life returning— vibrantly, ornately, almost inexplicably— fill my entire body with a relief not unlike a bare foot stepping onto a soft carpet of moss. When we’re not expecting something or someone, their presence can feel sudden and surprising (sometimes delightful, sometimes not), but when an arrival is anticipated, then absence rattles the ribcage, shoulder blades and collar bones. I don’t even know I’ve been holding my breath until after it’s over and my belly expands fully, knots untying themselves at least partially. The ground is still cold. I pile on my winter gear most mornings. The shining sun is a precious gift.
Nima, my youngest and five and a half year-old child, loves to look at baby pictures and videos of himself and his sister. He asks me to translate the baby-babble and explain the choices these babies were making (“Why am I drooling? Why is she smiling?”). He recognizes the people in these pictures: himself and Oona as babies, both of them as they grow, their dad and me, friends, but his life as a baby is now mysterious and delightful. Occasionally, a familiar toy or blanket appears in a photo, and these objects connect the life we observe in those depictions to the life we live, notice and reflect on now.
I’m in a seminar for my graduate program called Stories & Maps, and one of the ideas we are exploring are the distinctions (or lack thereof) among story, narrative and narrative discourse. Simply (though hopefully not too simplistically) put, the story is what happened, the narrative is the telling of what happened and the narrative discourse is how we tell of what happened. These things sound as if they could be progressive and one-directional, but they’re not. For example, neuroscientists have studied how the act of remembering can actually change a memory, so that our connection to what happened is altered by our narrative and narrative discourse. We could even say that how we tell a story changes the past. Along those lines, we know that “what happened” depends on our perspective (both literally and figuratively; that is, the angle of our view of the action in space and how our experiences and social location affect us), so, too, an awareness of the discourse reveals how the action itself may be more nuanced or even just plainly, completely different from how we perceived it at the time.
Every season is the mark of a new year, I feel this deeply. And spring is when I find myself slipping out of old skins. There’s the self I’ve outgrown, next to me for a time. Pale, translucent and brittle, I recognize it. Sometimes I grieve the way the scales have formed, as if they should have known better. Sometimes I can just appreciate the distance between the husk and my current shape, which is never not moving. The old skin rest now, an archive of who I’ve been, until it becomes part of the soil, reclaimed by the well of consciousness from which it emerged. The me I am without the protection of the old ways is bare, raw, naked in ways I’m unfamiliar with even though the state itself is not new to me.
Spring in the garden is a conglomeration of old and new, a place where reality challenges cliche. New Lemon Balm leaves, deep green and deeply wrinkled, unfurl from the dirt depths and hold space alongside the brown husks of last-year’s flowers. Old and new co-exist until a gardener— sometimes a human, though often the team forces of time (longer, train yourself to a longer time-keeper), wind and rain—removes them. New life doesn’t immediately displace old growth. This morning, as I write this, new seeds are tucked warmly into their tiny beds of soil in my makeshift nursery, motherwort I planted during the pandemic’s first wave brave the chilly uncertainty of April and a selection of last year’s lemon balm harvest steeps in sunflower oil on the shelf in my studio. We are here together.
Reading + Recommending:
I’m still reading The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (I recommend the John E. Woods translation, and that’s from a German major/speaker). Honestly, I really needed a year of slow reading, so I’m grateful for the pace and length of this book. It’s probably not for everyone (“IF YOU LIKE A PLOT, THIS BOOK WILL PROBABLY INFURIATE YOU” she said in a stage whisper), but for the right reader, this book is really something. Am I selling it? Do I need to?
Facial self-massage. I’m really into it. I’ve been watching videos by BeautyShamans on Instagram.
I’m reading a lot of poetry. Right now I’m really into this poem called “Disasters,” by George Oppen. It’s from his book Primitive, which I really can’t recommend highly enough.
It’s sort of a random story of how I got there— I was reading this essay by Theodor Adorno called “Commitment,” in which he famously writes “I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…” and while I absolutely appreciate the feeling of despair amidst/within/after genocide, the Sag-rising in me is looking for the way to turn every wound into light—, but I’m back reading Pleasure Activism, edited by adrienne maree brown. So GOOD.
I can’t believe this is true, but I just practiced inside a yoga/movement center for the first time in 3 years. And it was glorious. Moving and breathing with other people is even more amazing than I remember. Thank you for the practice, Rosehips Movement.
LOVE TO ALL+++
Kelly