A world worthy of life.

Writing through rage, grief--pushing those boulders down. A memory from the wild mind, shared through a poem from the archive.

I woke last night from a dream so real I could feel the surfaces. A boring-sounding dream: one where I was on a job interview for something that was about to change the trajectory of my life. It was all happening so quickly I couldn’t quite remember the parts of myself I was supposed to pitch—you know, the words to say to get the job. And as they moved me quickly through the process I was told that in a few hours in the same place as this interview would be a wedding for a friend I haven’t spoken to in almost ten years, and when I woke I wrote it down like I do every morning, dedicated I am to my dreams.

“Isn't it reasonable to assume that, projecting early human life into the far-distant future may not be the disaster movie we have come to love, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to tell the truth, raise the bar? To stand one remove from timeliness, like an artist encouraging reflection, stoking imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting his or her own life on the line, to imagine work in a world worthy of life?”

- Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

I spent today reminding myself this dream didn’t happen—starting as I stretched in the cold water of my morning shower, worried I might be late for my new position. The one that would change everything. How many times have I felt that I’d finally found the thing that would?

I had this irritation that I didn’t really have the right outfit on me—my closet now split between my apartment in the city and my mom’s house upstate as I am back and forth so much these days. I scold myself for letting resentment creep up at the ways I am pulled—shouldn’t I be grateful to have so much I belong to that I am forced to stretch myself? I want to be doing good work in the world and sometimes it isn’t always clear that I am.

I wonder at times if maybe this period, with all the grief it carries, wraps around itself a kind of gift. Would I really be a better writer if I could go to all the events, do all the things, have endless time to myself to worry and wonder and read? It sounds magical, and when I descend to my desk I could, and sometimes do, stay there for days—breaking only for food, the gym, walking my dog, family matters. Lately it’s taken me longer to drop in. I wonder if it’s because I haven’t had lulls, empty spaces, time to saturate myself in enough art outside of my own. My creative hours are so precious I want it to go all into what I am creating. But having to carry so much I hadn’t expected over the past few years—what shape does it make of me? What does it do to the work I can’t see, other than when I blame it for fracturing it—fracturing my attention, fracturing my time, fracturing me…these are selfish thoughts I tell myself. Who is that I want to be?

There’s a memory I return to at times, often enough I eventually turned the fragments into a poem a few years ago that never did find its home with a journal so I figured I would share it myself with you today. Maybe you will be able to read it in the full collection one day soon. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I think I’ll keep this archival post free. Will be playing around with this pattern and our subscription model for the fall, but all to say…here is an ode to waking up to our own patterns. At least I think. That’s what it was for me.

I’ve wanted to write since I created my first book in fifth grade. I wish I could remember what it was about only that I bound it and illustrated the pages. I’ve wanted to write since my mother and I would craft stories at night with the same protagonist, crafting her saga together. Since my dad got sick and I tried understanding what he left behind in the words he had written, made a life from. Since I had a journal where I wrote chapters of a ragtag novel about a friend group trying to get to Party City so they could plan a funeral. Since I wrote a short story about a cat at ten that was accused of plagiarism given my age. Since I started a secret LiveJournal in my teens only one friend had a link to—I performed the identity of a man in lower Manhattan running a Mexican restaurant and his lonely observations of his shop and the city. What purpose did they serve other than to give my hours meaning? Because my heart wanted to? It wasn’t a means of survival in terms of being compensated, but it was in terms of imagining my life connected to others. That there was more to the world, and my world, than my father dying. Than feeling excluded at school, feeling rejected in many ways by the world’s love. I could create something beautiful. I could speak.

The first time I ever said these words aloud: I want to write, to strangers, to people who hadn’t known me outside of my original context was deep in the Utah wildlands. I was on mile twenty of over a hundred. 18 years old. I hadn’t really dealt with the grief of my father’s illness or other traumas I’d suffered—mostly I’d been partying them away, smoking, doing whatever felt cool and available to me to pass time in our small town.

So to say to these people who didn’t know me, to whom I could be anyone, that I wanted to write, was a claim that I hadn’t known I needed to make, to recognize something deep within myself that was coming all along. And so during the next few weeks of walking along the trails, I would do just that: I wrote. Fragments of song lyrics, little poems, scenes, mostly messy scrawls on life, love, and desire. This sadness I struggled to name. This desire to be better. What it was I was learning out there in the woods all by myself.

One night we set up camp and all we could decide as a group was that the energy felt off—a collective intuition that where we had chosen to rest was all wrong. A few nights before a mountain lion and her cub had passed by our sleeping heads, an unknowable pardon, and perhaps we were heightened to the quiet dangers that might rock us from the beauty we savored during the bright days. Maybe we argued that we needed to be closer to a water source, or that there wasn’t enough wood to start our fire, but regardless of the reason we gave we all agreed to find new places for our beds.

Within thirty minutes, a boulder shot down the edge of the mountain and rolled over where our bodies had been stretched minutes before. We didn’t talk about it much. We kind of knew. We listened. We trusted.

We moved.

J