Wednesday, November 7, 2012

protection from leaving a trail

We raked the leaves from the hurricane. Rather than having the tree drop them all, the hurricane winds pulverized the leaves in the backyard. Bits of yellow and green, like herbs seasoning our land.  Granulated tree.

Everything I start to write seems useless, trite, redundant. I stand arms by my side, looking west, like an Easter Island head. There is something there beckoning me. What comes out of me lacks color. I sketch everything in vine charcoal. Nothing color, just grays. It is all easily smudged. And yet what is inside of me is bubbling and vibrant. I just cannot translate it. It is indigo and violet and smells of cedar and sage and pinecones. Between inside and outside, I feel restless, depressed, because writing has always come easily. I don't have writer's block, per se. But the past few weeks, I have felt stuck in my language. It is not enough. I need twenty-four words for the idea of identity and restlessness. Nothing is quite right. When I meditate and sit still with my discomfort, I see corn fields spread around me. Signs of fertility and prosperity, but to me, it is a sign of home. While I love many things about our town and neighborhood, I miss wide open skies and spaces to run. Though place has never meant a terribly great deal to me, the suburbs are driving me gray and fat. I can't muster the energy to leave the house anymore. I cannot get excited about the farmer's market and the dying lake.

Wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes. Or not matter how light you pack, you always take your shit with you. That's another saying. But I don't want to run away. That is not my goal. I am tired of New Jersey and no left turns. I crave wide open swaths of land in which to roam. I have nothing to offer here, and here has less to offer me than before. I want to watch the children run, learn the land, tend a large garden. I want them to learn to track and build lean-tos. To have moonlit rituals without people asking me what the fire was for and why we were dancing. I pace my cage. There is a fish aquarium quality to the suburbs that unnerves me. Our dining room windows look out on our neighbor's unfinished house. From the windows to their driveway is fifteen feet. I must pull the blinds if I don't want people to wave to me inside my own house. I hear the idle gossip from Facebook and texts and who gets invited where, and I just want to opt out now. 

My feet crave earth beneath them. My fingernails call to plants to break them down. I chew them now, because outside work used to keep them short and sweet. I want to talk about canning food and chopping firewood. I want to talk about existence rather than boredom. I want to help raise barns, if I have to interact with my neighbors, not hear fat jokes, and chitchat about who has what and how much. Around here, the trees are all being removed. It makes sense. Our land is too wet to support such large trees, which uproot in hurricanes and winter storms. I mourn each one, even as I know the necessity of removing them. It is this place that demands it. And I think I want a place that can handle large trees. I crave a surrounding that venerates solitude without whispers or fear of depression. I don't want to fit in. I just want to be. These suburbs beg for peering out curtains and drawing conclusions. I engage in it too, and it is a part of myself that I hate.

I read this book recently called the Snow Child. It opens with a stillbirth. Set in 1920s, it is about this infertile couple who decide to homestead in Alaska, because they can no longer handle the world after the death of their only son. They want to be alone. Completely, utterly alone. Until they make a snow child who comes to life.

It took me months and months to read this book. I would start it. When the stillbirth was mentioned, I would place it aside. I no longer want to read solely about this heartbreak I know intimately. No longer. And yet, the book was not about stillbirth at all. Just one part of their story. And the rest of it, I got it. I wanted that self-sufficiency of an Alaskan homesteader in 1920. I understood the way stillbirth makes you crave mere existence, rather than the idleness of wealth and comforts. As I read, I coveted the harshness of winter, the land that runs for months around that. The part that is most decisive and positive of what is needed and important. I am mostly indifferent, and wishy-washy here in this life, because nothing seems that important or life altering. Do I want to eat at Cheesecake Factory or Applebees? Do I want to shop at Lowe's or Home Depot? 

I move through this life after Lucia's death. Stillbirth is just one part of my story, but it is the bend in the road. The thing that reprioritized everything. That part of me, the one before Lucia, falls on my soul yard pulverized. I keep thinking of that Pema Chodron quote, "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." And maybe I am ready to move past the annihilation and into that which is indestructible. That part of me that seeks aloneness is getting louder and louder. May I not leave a trail.


8 comments:

  1. I understand. This year, actually last week, I was faced with a realization I've never had before. I discovered I was pregnant with Calypso on December 13th.... I had a Christmas with my angel. I had no idea of this before! I had blocked it from my head. This has rocked me, 5 years after her death suddenly the holidays are looking completely different and I'm not entirely sure how to process it.

    I've decided for Thanksgiving we won't be going to all the family get togethers. We're going to do something at home and private. Something we can include our angel in without jeering comments and laughs.

    Sorry for taking over your post. I just needed to get this all out

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    1. Never apologize for comments. They are so welcome and hearing your experience and how grief realizations change helps. I find it fascinating how these revelations change the experience of grief and the memory of our losses. Sending lots of love to you. Here to talk if you need.

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  2. I thought of you as I posted yesterday, because your words (very different from Dear Sugar's) also ring so true in the way that you seem to pluck what I'm thinking out of my brain but cast it in words that are surprising and revealing even though they always echo familiar themes. Anyway, this too. I have a hard time reading about stillbirth these days. When I was pregnant a second time, my husband and I said to each other that if we lose this baby, too, we'll move away, into the country, and live off the grid. It was a promise we made. Because the ordinariness of life would be unbearable. We would have to toil and sweat in order to survive. Very different from running up to Target.

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    1. Aw, Brooke, are you trying to ruin all my dreams by telling me how different I am than Dear Sugar? (I've been gunning to take over that position for YEARS!)

      You nailed it here, Brooke. The ordinariness of life becomes unbearable.

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  3. Great post. the wide open spaces, the privacy, the getting back to the earth, dirt underneath our feet. There's this too, "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." This is such a wonderful quote and a great meditation. Over and over, and over again, do we fall in the hole and discover we have been there before, what do we do that next time we fall in the hole, we recognize it for what it is so that we may go around it the next time we see a dark place. All of your work you are doing, is getting you to that place where you walk around the dark hole. But, we must know that hole intimately so that we know how to recognize it. All of this shit we go through, all of it, is giving us ways to know ourselves intimately, so that we can become true, confident, compassionate, open.

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    1. Thank you, kb, for this and all your comments. I always treasure your insights here. I love the dark hole analogy. It rings very true to me.

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  4. I sometimes feel that I want a white house on a hill with a porch, surrounded by big open fields. And whenever I am driving around here and I see one, I want to stop the car. I don't even know what for.

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    1. Me too. I'm at my mother's house and am having an impossible time coming home. So impossible, I just decided to stay here until the funeral. I miss home, which is weird to say out loud, but I do.

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