Every Job Has a First Day

By Rebecca Gayle Howell

Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river
the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what
was left. But what could live wanted to and tried,
treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins.
He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was
an anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I remember
that, his nickel smile right at me, his fingers
letting fall the small fish muscles into a bag filled
with yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or what
it was he thought he was doing, but we talked,
I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.
They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release
when we tense to catch. You have to believe it,
he said. You don’t mean any harm.

Every spring, this poem by Rebecca Gayle Howell finds me. And every spring, something in me opens a little more to it. I think it’s because the poem itself is doing what it’s describing. Relaxing its own hand.

She never asks. She just watches Slade, rubber boots in all that heat, kneeling beside what’s barely a river anymore, and she listens. There’s something so radical about that to me. The not interrogating. The just… receiving? And what he gives her is almost embarrassingly simple: relax your hand just enough. Because they can smell it, he says. The oils our pores release when we tense to catch. Both fear and hesitation can land before intention.

I’ve read that ending so many times, and it still smacks me in the back of the head. Because it doesn’t feel comforting to me. It feels like a condition. Like gentleness isn’t something we arrive at. It’s something we keep having to keep finding our way(s) back to.

If you’ve known me long, you’ve probably seen the two-inch gash across my chin. Maybe even heard about the plate in my skull. I endured a lot of violence in active addiction, and I don’t really talk about it. What recovery gave me, among its stranger gifts, is that people now find it genuinely difficult to picture me as someone capable of brutality. And I find that, still, to be one of the first places I locate grace. Not as a concept, but as a transmutive property. It’s something that really happened to me. I needed whatever you call God to break me down into little pieces so he could start all over again. And what I keep learning, slowly and not without resistance, is how many ways there are to reach for and cling to things. There’s the clenched fist, and a hand that doesn’t mean to tighten, but still can. I’ve known both. I genuinely don’t know which one is harder to hold.

Nobody wants to turn on the news more than twice a week right now. And sometimes the shared depletion and desperation feel more brutal than they did when I was using, and I haven’t done heroin in over a decade and a half. Something in me shrinks when I’m on my phone too long, even if it’s just reading the daily from NPR. But I can’t look away either. The puddles are getting smaller. And still, there are people choosing compassion when hardness would be so much easier. I see them every week. And even now, this poem keeps pulling me out of the murky, stagnant water of all of it.

I come back to the muck because it’s there. We can’t withhold the answer we carry. The antidote I carry in my soul feels equivalent to that yellow tap. And I think there are plenty of us on the shoreline of dried-up rivers, holding the thing that saved us, wondering if it might save someone else, too.

I’m not going to get it right every time. But something in me keeps returning to the idea that the capacity is there, even when I can’t feel it. And on the days I can’t [and there are more of those than I’d like to admit] I find myself doing something that still surprises me. And frankly, it astonishes me a little: I pray for it. Which is an insane thing to type as an apostate. But maybe that’s what belief is. Not the perpetual feeling of absolution, but the continual work of turning towards possibility. At least that’s where I’m finding it. In the reaching.

When I first encountered this poem back in 2019, I was struck by Limón’s insistence on precision, her refusal to let silence be singular. It reminded me of something I’d learned in and through chronic pain: that people with similar conditions develop elaborate taxonomies for suffering. The McGill Questionnaire2 offers seventy-eight descriptors (78!): flickering, quivering, pulsing, throbbing. We’ve mapped out almost the entire geography of pain, especially when compared to other sensations. But, of course, the question is: why? Is it because naming our pain makes it real, or because naming it makes it bearable? Or is it something else entirely — that through the naming, we assert that we are still here, still capable of distinction, still refusing to be flattened by our afflictions?

And silence? I still often approach it as a monolith when, really, as Limón demonstrates, each silence carries its own weight and texture. I have known California’s quiet, but not her Kentucky silence, and I have lived the quiet of not answering the phone, of turning off the lights and pretending I’m not at home, even when I’m standing in line at Publix. But it’s that final image that haunts me, follows me till it possesses me: silence building in my body until it becomes unbearable, until it breaks me or I break into sound. But again, I have to ask: which machine? The body? Consciousness? Or perhaps the instrument by which we transform experience into meaning, into story, into something we can hand to another person and say: “this is a part of what I carry”. And in that transformation and translation, there lies the hope that they will do more than see it or hear it, but their presence alone may steady and stay us from being the proverbial tree that falls in the forest.

When I think about what it means to really listen, not just to hear but to attend with the absolute fullness of who we are, I keep coming back to Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie, in 1997’s film adaption of Carl Sagan’s “Contact”3, sitting in front of those giant radio telescopes with her headphones on, sifting through static for a literal sign from the heavens. There’s something particular about Dr. Arroway’s faith (even though she’s an atheist) that gets at what I’m trying to understand about attention itself. She and her team spent years listening to cosmic noise, teaching themselves to distinguish between meaningful signals and the universe’s background hum. The film doesn’t really interrogate what this does to a person — the loneliness of it, the discipline required to keep faith that something, anything might answer back when year after year, nothing does, and till this point, nothing ever has. But I think about it all the time, the way that kind of listening might hollow you out or fill you up or maybe both at once.

In Sagan’s original novel, after Ellie receives the message from Vega, she discovers Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous in his book, “The Idea of the Holy4,” during her research. Otto argued that humans have an innate capacity to detect and revere the awe-inspiring. He called this the “mysterium tremendum”, the mystery that makes us tremble, that repels even as it compels. For Otto, the numinous is “wholly other.” The only honest response to encountering it is what he calls “absolute astonishment.” He was writing about religious experience, about encounters with the divine. Still, I wonder if his framework might apply to something more ordinary and more challenging: the experience of truly encountering another person’s interiority, their suffering or their unique form of joy, which is always, in some fundamental way, inaccessible to us. Wholly other.

Perhaps, all intimacy is a form of listening through the static, trying to distinguish signals of who someone actually is from the noise of who we want them to be, who they sometimes pretend to be, or who we’re afraid they might be. And the numinous thing that makes us tremble — isn’t always mystical or grand. Sometimes it’s just the shock of recognition when someone sees you clearly, when a hand squeezes yours in a church basement next to shitty coffee and communicates: “I know this, I’ve been exactly where you are right now”, without saying a word. Or when someone draws a sun on the back of your rear-window for no reason except that they thought you might need more light in your life. These small transfigurations, that Otto probably wouldn’t have dignified with the term numinous, can make or break us. They can make or break anyone.

What haunts me today about Contact is the ending, specifically the way Ellie returns from her journey, whether through a wormhole or a hallucination; the film deliberately refuses to confirm, with no proof of what happened to her. Just her own testimony: “It was beautiful. They should have sent a poet. “ She experienced something that unmade and remade her, something she can only describe as contact with the wholly other, and she has no way to make anyone else believe her. All she has is her own insistence and the terror that her experience might be fundamentally untransmittable.

This way of being so unmade, or desolated by an experience that we have to be remade, might be the truest terror of living. Every day, there is more to lose. Simone Weil understood this differently. “Grace fills empty spaces,” she wrote5, “but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” I’ve read that excerpt over 100 times, and it still pierces me while liberating me, because I need the divine to rush in, and simultaneously, I don’t want it to, because I know it will be painful. Contemporary psychology might refer to this as “post-traumatic growth,” but Weil suggests something more radical: that emptiness itself might be the beginning of transformation, not its enemy.

Weil called our pull toward distraction “gravity”: the force that drags us toward compulsion, toward “everything which is grasped.” She was writing in 1947, but she could have been describing the particular weight of social media and the news cycle: the way our thumbs move toward our phones without conscious choice, the dopamine feedback loops that Silicon Valley engineers explicitly designed to be addictive. In Limón’s terms, this gravity prevents us from experiencing any of her distinct silences. Instead, we get the static that masks every potential void before grace can enter. And frankly, it makes sense to want to paper over it, because sadness and loss have so many challenging textures and weights. There’s “crying in the shower sadness”, and there’s “weeping on the kitchen floor of your 1-bedroom apartment heartbreak”. There are “don’t look at yourself in the mirror” types of loss, and “I can’t bring myself to turn on the news today” kinds of despair.

But what am I doing when I create these categories? What strange comfort do I find in distinguishing shower-crying from kitchen-floor collapse? I keep thinking there’s something I’m trying to protect — maybe the belief that if I can name each specific sorrow, I can contain it. As if precision could save me (it rarely has). As if by naming each shade of suffering, I could master it. I’ve been thinking about the mathematics of withholding. Each day, we subtract: what happened, minus what hurt, minus what could destroy us if we said it out loud. We hand each other these remainders: “I’m ok!” [The exclamation does so much work here] as if the truth were too radioactive to touch directly.

In her poem “The Spell6,” Marie Howe illustrates how she performed this calculus on a daily basis: “I dropped you off, taught my class, and had a tuna-fish sandwich”. When her daughter keeps demanding, “Tell me the whole thing, mom,” she isn’t asking for information; she’s asking for confirmation: that her mother exists beyond this daily ritual of performance. When Howe finally cracks — Elise’s death, frozen tears, ascending serpents — even the truth arrives in fragments. The whole thing can rarely be made whole in the moment we try to tell it. Language can fail exactly where we need it most. “All the frozen tears are mine, of course.” Of course. Of-fucking-course, because that’s what it’s like to be stuck in grief.

For Howe: Elise is dead, and the world feels weary and brokenhearted. And most of us [especially as we approach middle age] know what that feels like. This is precisely where this poem becomes a form of CT surgery for me. That line cracks me open like a Finochietto retractor, because the world feels wearier and more broken-hearted than it ever has. Melissa is dead, and I get to live, and sometimes I don’t know what to do with this one wild and precious life. And I know this sounds fucked up, but when I was sick, really sick with my autoimmune disorder, it was easier because I knew my story and role. Sometimes, long-term/chronic illness simplifies things. It gives you a job: to endure with bravery and grace. Sure, it’s a terrible and exhausting job, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, and yet (and yet!) it was a job I was good at. But this? This after? This liminal wellness, this brutal ongoingness? This is where the voice from the backseat becomes insistent: “No. Tell me the whole thing.” And the entire thing is, I’m not sure I know how to live a life that doesn’t revolve around survival. Maybe, like Lazarus, I don’t know what to do after returning to the land of the living. Perhaps no one does, and we’ve all agreed not to discuss it.

Simone Weil finds me here, again, in exile, or where I keep encountering her in the malheur. Affliction, as she called it. Weil insisted that affliction is utterly distinguishable from ordinary suffering. Affliction, she wrote7, uproots us completely. It’s physical distress and spiritual desolation, yes, but also social degradation. It pushes us past the margins, making us unrecognizable to ourselves and others. What Weil understood, and what I’m only beginning to understand, is that affliction isn’t just pain or suffering dialed up to 11. Affliction is the continuous rending out of belonging. People no longer know what to do with you. You don’t know what to do with yourself. You become illegible, which is different from being misunderstood.

And maybe that’s why I keep returning to Lazarus and Ellie, why I can’t let their stories be static. Because their stories are also stories about illegibility, about what happens when you’ve crossed a boundary that no one else has crossed. The story we tell freezes Lazarus at the tomb’s mouth — unwinding his grave clothes, blinking into the unbearable light — and then we cut away. We stop the story precisely at the moment of resurrection because everything that comes after that is mucky. I’m trying to understand what I’m protecting myself from when I insist that transformation happens all at once [even though I have over a decade of evidence that this isn’t the case], when I need change to arrive decisively, thoroughly: before and after. I still want my transformation to be postable on Instagram: from dead to alive, from sick to well, from broken to whole. These binaries comfort me because they suggest an endpoint, a place where I can finally arrive and can rest for a while. I still want to tell myself that crossing the threshold is the hard part, and once you’re across, you’re done. But I’ve been on both sides now, and here’s what they told me: the thresholds never stop. The crossing never ends. You don’t transform once and then rest in your transformation. You change, and then you have to keep changing, keep choosing, and keep showing up to a life that insists on the cycle of building, freezing, and breaking.

What devastates me, now, when I read “The Spell” isn’t Howe’s confession but what happens after. Her daughter looks toward “the unlived life” — not at her mother, not at the road, but sideways toward all the parallel worlds that exist alongside this one. She says, “Ok,” while still looking in that direction. This might be a new form of grace for me: I will sit here with your unbearable information. I will not require it to become something else.

And fuck me, I can’t stop requiring things to become something else! When Howe writes “if that wave broke it might wash my life clear,” she’s built two conditionals stacked on top of each other like a grammatical cauldron. Her lynchpinned might preserves two incompatible possibilities simultaneously: that grief, fully felt, could transform us; and that grief, fully felt, could engulf us. I know them both, the possibility that seduces: promising that if I just surrender more, if I’m willing enough, if I utter just one more 3rd step prayer, I’ll emerge purified, renewed. And the possibility that threatens: a warning that surrender could be just another form of meaningless suffering in a life that’s already had enough of it. What terrifies me about Howe’s conditional spell isn’t the uncertainty - it’s that I hear her voice tremble in my own, the way I’ve been saying “might” for years. Every morning I wake up and take another hit of the conditional, another dose of maybe, another day suspended between outcomes. We all do this with something terrible — choosing the permanent deferral. It means we never have to find out who we’d be without our carefully maintained sadness and grief.

​​But there’s something else happening in that car, something I missed for years reading this poem. Howe’s daughter isn’t just witnessing her mother’s suspension — she’s learning that “might” is the condition we all live in. Not just those of us with documented trauma or catalogued pain, but everyone. Every person she’ll ever love will be conjugated in the conditional: might stay, might leave, might break her heart, might heal it. When she looks toward the unlived life, she’s performing an act of honesty that her mother can’t quite manage. She’s acknowledging that every life is unlived until we choose to live it, that we’re all sideways to our own existence, glancing at what might be while sitting in what is.

Otto wrote that the numinous is “wholly other,” but he was thinking about God, about the divine breaking through our ordinary categories. What I’m beginning to understand is that we are all wholly other - not just to each other, but to ourselves. Each of us sitting in our cars like Howe and her daughter, suspended between the life we’re living and our unlived lives if we turned right. Each of us, like Ellie, returning from our own journeys through affliction with no proof except our insistence: it happened, it changed every part of me, I cannot make you understand.

When Otto described the mysterium tremendum — the mystery that makes us tremble — perhaps he was also describing this: the terrible recognition that every act of naming (our silences, our pains, our particular forms of sadness) is both an attempt at connection and an admission of isolation. We develop these elaborate taxonomies not because precision saves us, but because sometimes, precision is all we have. And that precision must be built until it can no longer be precise. Otto gave us a beautiful language for trembling before the divine, his mysterium tremendum. But what I’m learning is that I also need a language for trembling before the mystery of continuous ordinary living. Maybe this is the spell Howe was trying to cast: not the one that unlocks precise meaning, but the one that makes illegibility and the unknowable bearable. The one that lets us say “Ok” while looking sideways, realizing what might be possible if we allowed that wave to break and wash us clear. That our lives could begin, again, from now and from here.

Ok?

Ok.

I have tried, over and over, to enter this essay the way a door opens in another room. More than anything, I want to hold your face in my hands and tell you, “The work in us is not finished yet”. I know it’s a grind bringing your everything, especially when you feel shackled to the past. Like Van Gogh’s sadness, the missing can go on forever - but perhaps an impossible longing that spreads is necessary for us to make room. Jorie Graham would remind us that our task is to handle the fire without getting obliterated and still pass on the fire, which feels like ancestral magic. A magic that I remember more than I discover as I age. I think that wisdom exists in each of us. We’ve just forgotten it. In a workshop in 2019 - I asked Ada Limón how she could dive into grief without burning up on (re)entry, and she responded: “Mostly because I’ve done it a lot […] We’ve all romanticized looking for answers at the bottom of the well […] you’ve got to protect yourself; know your strength, what you’re capable of that day - even at that moment. Some days we’re better equipped to dive in; you must care for yourself - mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Ensure you have a way out [of grief or despair]; sometimes, the poem [itself] is the way out. “  

Among the ways that we're most connected to one another is that we’re all going to experience insurmountable loss. We all have to live with the deteriorating state of the world and unanswerable questions. Tony Hoagland believes “[..] that's why / we invented the complex sentence, so we could stand at a distance, // and make adjustments // in the view // while trying hard to track / the twisty, ever-turning plot”.  And I believe that [true] recognition - of our feeble attempts to solve what no one else has solved facilitates a life of care. But only if we stop framing those questions so they fit the story we want to tell about our lives. Part of owning our story is letting the truth defend itself, even if it’s awful. I used to tell my story like I was describing a haunted house because I couldn’t bear the telling [eldrich horror] of what lived inside it. Our task isn’t to solve the beautiful terribles but to tend and hold them while allowing them to ripen us. Rilke told us to live the questions, but part of his insistence was for us to stop looking for answers, and that type of surrender is tricky because you have to choose it, sometimes multiple times a day. And then you gotta get up tomorrow and do it all over again. I have learned that grief is cone-shaped, and we will always orbit the gravity of immense loss and trauma - but we have to dissent on the days when we feel their gravity pulling us toward the event horizon. I believe part of our duty in recovery is refusing to fall after we’ve risen. We all stumble occasionally, but I’m talking about refusing to return to what buried you. Marie Howe assures us: “It hurts to be present [on these days], though. I ask my students every week to write ten observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them….Just tell me what you saw this morning in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And resisting metaphor is very difficult because you have to endure the thing itself…” 

In Paper Houses, Dominique Fortier reminds us that many masters, like Emily Dickinson, have already shown us how to endure and pay attention to the difficult and the banal: “As she writes, [ Dickinson] erases herself. She disappears behind the blade of grass that, if not for her, we would never have seen. She does not write to express herself, perish the thought. […S]he doesn’t write to be noticed. She writes to bear witness: here lived a flower, for three days in July, the year of 18**, killed by a morning shower. Each poem is a tiny tomb erected to the memory of the invisible.” This type of witnessing is a bright darkness. An earnestness that doesn’t strive to solve but to hold will give off its own light - because [holy shit] it turns out that holding and surrendering to the impossible thing is the critical alchemy to our bioluminescence. 

Joy, like poetry [according to John Berger], “can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates…by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered”. It is the evidence of our reaching across to one another in the midst of, or as a way even of caring for, one another's sorrows. And without sadness, joy would become something else entirely. Perhaps it wouldn’t exist at all. The perceived simplicity of meekness shifts in this context away from its synonymy with weakness and transmutes into an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, fuses to both our ethics and politics. It is the ethos of [my] queerness because I reached a point where I wanted to live differently so desperately that it altered my gender identity [he/they], reverberating Bell Hook’s definition because I was at odds with everything around me and something deep down needed to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live. Queerness, for me, is the antithesis of hyper-independence and masochism. Gordon Marion wrote: “In general, tenderness involves increased sensitivity. When we say that an injury is tender, we mean that it is hyper-sensitive to the touch. And in moments of tenderness, it is as though the ego and all its machinations momentarily melt away so that our feelings are heightened and we are perhaps moved by the impulse to reach out with a comforting hand.”  Gentleness was [and is] my force of secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called potentiality. If we hold the virtues of tenderness at our cores, the concise list of impossible things may never leave us, but the other list - of what is still possible - becomes exponential. Our greatest challenge doesn’t lie with either list - but with the limitations of our imaginations. I still return to “​​Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,” where Lori Gottlieb’s therapist, Wendall, illustrates for her: 

“I’m reminded,” he begins, “of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.”

He pauses, allowing the image to sink in.

“All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.”

Because it’s such an accurate visualization of entitlement [at least for me], gentleness and tenderness already made the exits out of that prison, but we refuse to use them because they require us to let go of the bars [familiar pain, grief, or shame] we’ve been clinging to. I have been wrong whenever I believed I needed something specific for healing or transmutation. Not only was I wrong, and it prevented me from healing - but holding onto that belief exacerbated that pain. It’s laughable now, but my most significant failures [and character defects] in my 20s revolved around believing life [or someone else] owed me answers. This isn’t much different than a 7-year-old throwing a temper tantrum in the cereal aisle because they tried to sneak cinnamon toast crunch into the shopping cart and got caught. We don’t get to decide what life owes us or what miracles the universe offers. Although, there have been times when I wished I could climb that stairway to heaven and smash open the spigot from which grace seems to be metered. Accepting that I’m not in control is another form of surrender, knowing I didn’t earn this grace through my suffering. But, I believe I can be worthy of it if I extend it to others and keep my palms open like windows. 

I find it prudent to believe any pain that we’ve processed will also die [if we stop excavating around it], that wear and tear await every haunted house, and that some [pains] already have no more meaning for us as their ghosts fade like film left out in the July sun. I know the miracle of today, like everything else, attains its richness in what erodes and decays in time. The gift of friendship isn’t just in recognition, equipping, and believing in the other - but the nourishment that is only possible through our mingling. It is the source of our greatest sorrows and attachments and our place of luminescence. What purpose does that light serve but to illuminate the ways between you and me? I know something wonderful is happening to us - if we would allow it. I know that we have not forgotten each other. I think of you all with the utmost/excruciating warmth, and in a sense - I pray for each of you nightly. And while I wish I could take each of your hands and hold them dear in mine - want I wish for most is that you continue to be who you are and who you’ve been called to be. And if you aren’t yet, I pray that you are convicted to. I wish for nothing more than transformative experiences in your lives and awakenings in each of our hearts.

There's a dream I keep having where I'm running up the stairs of your porch to your front door. A dream where nothing separates us. Not space. Not time, borders, or language. A dream where I am with you, and the loss has finally made us both open, [and love, it bears repeating] open roads. 

Let me be the wave. And if I cannot be the wave, let me be the rupture at the bottom. Let me be that terrible first rift in the dark.

— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

I've been dwelling recently on [what feels to be] both the essence and futility of words in times like these. I'm reaching that season where I want to let my voicemail box fill up until it rejects calls automatically. When I go through these periods of courting silence, I can become so involved* with making a poem or writing an essay that I'm not constantly thinking or worried about how that desire for inner peace or discovery is affecting others**. I'm no longer afraid of revealing myself to myself [shout out to a decade of BCT and working the 4th step ]. That's the goal of recovery —to dig in deep enough to be transformed while writing the poem. Even when sadness feels Sisyphean, it doesn't bother me. And I don't think I'm treating the mountain like a hedonistic treadmill - it's just that the boulder is easier to push when it's your sadness. To bastardize Camus: there is always a point where we are relieved of our burden[s] - and perhaps - we can rise above our fates knowing that the struggle toward such tremendous heights is enough to fill our hearts. It's why trusting a transformation doesn't require much faith the second time. You don't just have the evidence; you are the evidence. Everything before that is just living in the ashes. When I first got clean, I believed recovery was possible [for others], but I didn't think it was possible for me until my desire to use was lifted. Similarly, I hated another cliche in the rooms until I experienced it: "Don't leave until the miracle happens." and goddamnit, they were right! Rilke called this "living our way into the answers" - and it is, hands down, the best thing about getting older.

[ * obsessed, **my therapist calls this a limitation and told me to stop calling it a personal failing because every introspective-introvert struggles with this. ]

I spent most of my twenties trying to fight my sorrow and isolate myself from my suffering, which is also a way of isolating myself from others. Taking off our armor is easy. Allowing someone past the rope while it's off, well, that's something else. But, like Barbara Brown Taylor, deep down, I still believe all of us want to wake to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count. But Dostoevsky knew that [active love of paying attention] doesn't just take practice, but labor and fortitude, and for some people [it is] a complete science. 

Ellen Bass has this marvelous poem titled "The Long Recovery," where she asks: How can I hurl myself deeper into this life? Which continues to be a, if not the central, question for me. How do we bear it [the weight of the world and all our losses and trauma] and still live fully and without diminished wonder and awe? It's another practice [of course]. First comes the prayer, "I want to experience this life differently." And then comes the decision, followed by the method. I always return to Lucille Clifton's: "I choose joy because I am capable of it [..]" and not just with joy, but tenderness, compassion, and gentleness - or any emotion that's difficult to reach. Contempt, violence, entitlement, and apathy aren't on the bottom shelf like we (like to) imagine. It doesn't take any work to get there. They're accessible by design, perhaps even the display cases at the end of every aisle. Sometimes I must stop and ask myself, "What am I reaching for?" because I can still blur the line between discernment and judgment. It's almost like I need a "screen time report" for what emotions I've been holding in my body at the end of the day. What have I been devoting energy to if my stomach is in knots and my shoulders ache? If arthritis in my hands makes me wince when I brush my teeth, is it my autoimmune disorder acting up, or have I been holding onto a painful memory? But love and [shared] joy - those emotions are expansive. They feel like standing in a field at dusk. Being seen, witnessed, and cared for are balms for the soul and the body. We all need it. And the more we give in return, the bigger our cup gets. That's why people who've lost the most (can) generally come closer to another's sorrow. It's not just about empathy or sympathy but our ability to hold and approach the intolerable. The unendurable happens. People we love and we can't live without are going to die. We're going to die. One day we're going to have to leave everyone and everything behind. It's unendurable and inevitable. All art holds that knowledge. But it's a singularity, like trying to see the other side of a black hole, so we must blindly experience it before learning how to [correctly] approach it. 

Practicing joy is often a matter of embracing and celebrating our entanglements - even though attachments can be painful. Meaning [to me] often condenses to giving and receiving care and attention. I can often feel profound joy in solitude. The more I think, learn, practice, study, et cetera, the more I know my solitude is never complete. Because even if I'm alone, I'm bringing everyone I love into my body and being. And that's a lot of people. There's always a gathering inside of us. Simone de Beauvoir wrote: "I'm not thinking about the day when I'll see you again, […] I don't need to see you — I'm not separated from you; I'm still in the same world as you. […] I love you. You haven't left me," And we have to reacquaint ourselves with that gathering —which sometimes I think can be very difficult to do if you're busy or amid other kinds of gatherings. I have a meaningful life when I collaborate with my select few. But I can't always operate in that small circle, so I must work toward collaborative care, recovery, and support, which is always an act of personal and political revolution. And it might just be that meaning is how we care for each other. Cooking for someone is an instance of belonging. And even if my gluten-free brownies are terrible, it doesn't matter because we can make another trip to the grocery store together. 

I can do your dishes while you tell me the untold story you've been holding inside yourself. If we allow it, it can feel like the beginning of belonging to one another, and that feeling will incite more understanding and care, by which we will belong to one another more. And I want to articulate, but more importantly, notice how we do this daily. I want to honor it so much that it's blinding, like how I sneeze three times when I walk outside in the bright sunlight. Because the idea of you and me changes when we laugh, cry, and dance together. Every gardener will tell you that a regular practice of the garden is to share. You've got extra zucchini; you share them. You share your tomatoes because three people at the office understand that love language. Every act of care troubles the boundary between you and me. Inciting joy and practicing tenderness are direct results of grief, but more specifically, they result from the heartache we choose to carry together. And there might be a lot of joy there. Our most profound tendency is that if someone needs something, we give it. It's the practice of witnessing in the midst of what is always all so difficult. The trick is turning it into an active alchemy. It is what I hope to make my complete science. 

As Mary Jo Bang wrote: "This is the bread: body, soul, exquisite tenderness. We are all we have."

[..]

Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone's.

- Marina Tsvetaeva

The older I get, the more fascinated and attracted I become to emotions like sweetness, which have no place in the pantheon of apprised and social concerns yet are vital to me. Tenderness is the opposite to greed, vanity, and masculinity - and I don't get on with lust for power or attention. I'm far more intrigued by sensitivity, weakness, fear, and anxiety because, like Alain de Botton, I believe that behind our masks, at the end of the day, that's what we are. That's where we want to be - but most of us are stalled by old patterns and muscle memory with our phones that prevent us from practicing genuine attention and the gift of stillness. My therapist refers to these roadblocks as "secondary satisfactions." Sometimes I can over-correct and turn my phone on DnD for days at a time, which can, regardless of my intention - feel like neglect when I take the better part of a week to respond to a text message.

Galway Kinnell said, "The secret title of every good poem might be 'Tenderness.'" It's a difficult entry point, but awe and gentleness are the touchstones of the work I hold most dear. Natalie Diaz calls her hands "the gates of tenderness," so when I read a poem by her - when I have one of her books in her hands - she’s asking me to open my gates. It's simple to "love art," 'but it's much harder to love what the artist asks us to love - whether that's a neglected part of ourselves or another. When we bear the unbearable, our concept of self is altered, and poetry helps us both mourn and embrace that shift. Writing is embedded in the essence of personal recovery —when I write a poem or essay that succeeds, I am not the same person I was before I wrote it. Sometimes this transformation is subtle, and sometimes it's big. Some poems I've written have changed how I look in the mirror in the morning. A lot of it is involved with bearing the unbearable. It changes and creates a different you. You keep pangs of who you are, but something essential changes, and we are enlarged. When we talk about being enlarged and transformed and enriched, it can sound like it's all exemplary, but of course, you must be brought to your knees again and again for that. I think of difficult life experiences as a softening, throwing us down - sometimes painfully - over and over enough that our edges are smoothed.

When someone asks me why I love poetry, there are countless answers, but most of them surround poetry's capacity to bear witness to the world and its sorrows - as they are. All art holds this tension between elegy and ode, between our sorrows, despairs, and sufferings, and the praise, wonder, and awe we feel. W.H. Auden said that "every poem is rooted in imaginative awe." And imaginative awe is really hard to practice! Especially if we're stuck holding a painful emotion like shame, grief, or hopelessness. We're not meant to hold those emotions for extended periods, and we're certainly not meant to carry them alone. Paul Sheperad wrote: "The grief and sense of loss, which we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered." Like Tsvetaeva - I want to know about that otherness. I want to find the source! But I also wonder if the gift of [secular or mystic] grace lies with trusting that even though we are [often] denied gentleness and understanding, we can still extend them to others. Perhaps there comes a point where we no longer need to know where that well of light inside us comes from, only our calling to rise with it

All art tries to make meaning out of chaos somehow—to take the mess of this un-reconstructed life and find patterns. When we go through an immense crisis or terrible loss - it's easy to get lost scouring the wreckage. We can't move on when we keep going back and asking the same questions. The gift of life is it's a mystery and an exploration. I'm asking myself, what is this all about? Whatever I'm looking at—whether it's a small thing that piqued my interest or a big part of my life's journey. I'm looking at it and trying to discover something I didn't know before. That's when sorrow and grief can become windows. You've gotta let the light in - but you also need to air out your soul. Zora Neale Hurston said, "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you." We must descend into the dark yet continually try to climb out of it. In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake said we have to go to heaven for form and to hell for energy and marry the two. There is vitality in that move vs. the kind of anemia in popular New Age spirituality. There's not much blood in it. It lacks what in Spanish is sometimes called duende: the erotic, dialectic energy that makes things shimmer. Blake knew that much of that energy was removed from our lives and relegated to hell. So we have to go into the shadows and bring it back out. Our hyper-positive tendencies want us to do a spiritual bypass around the mess of it all, but it's in that mess that we are most human. 

Ascent and descent should vitalize each other: when we polarize them, we end up weighing and pitting experiences and emotions against each other. We praise success and despise failure. We value strength and devalue weakness. But then, every time we encounter defeat, inadequacy, or loss, we're at war with ourselves, and that's a bitter fight. Sometimes I'll apologize in therapy for "going backward" as if forward was the only acceptable direction. But the psyche moves every which way. It's our job to follow its lead and be curious and willing about where it is taking us. As Stafford writes:

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

Whether our "thread" is a question, an invitation, or an awareness of what matters most-it always takes us home to ourselves, to our belonging in this world, to the inexplicable love that holds & keeps us. These days, I have become aware that I can hold & follow my thread in various places - washing dishes, buying groceries, sitting in the parking lot while listening to the new 1975 single, in solitude or with others, in the city or the forest. Mostly, I admit, the key to following my thread is to put my hand on my chest to breathe and remind myself that if we're lucky, our threads can be intertwined. Rushing makes me lose awareness of the threads we hold. So, as the week begins, I want to consider together: How do we keep and follow the threads that bind and guide us?

Like Murakami: We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

I’m holding that thread. I love you. I’m listening. 

Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things–the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this–joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

One of the great joys of my life is talking with my friends who are [also] writers and poets, individually and together. I love when someone sends me a draft or a poem they haven't shared with anyone else. I have this folder on my desktop full of rough drafts and voice memos from friends. It's communion for me. I treasure the simplicity of "I want to share this with you - directly." I know that takes a lot of guts. And it feels cringy the first time you do it. But that's because we've gotten farther and farther away from the sound of what's genuine in each of us. Part of that is because we're bombarded with [horrible] news, reels, and click-bait, anything that will keep scrolling or fuming - as long as we stay on our phones. 

In a clip from a 2019 panel on "Self Esteem in the Age of Social Media," comedian Bo Burnham describes how social media companies are out to colonize "every second of our lives": ~ "They're not even doing it consciously. It's because these companies, like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and everything, went public. They went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based on growth. They cannot stay stagnant. [They have to] get more of you."

So the glaring sound of what used to/should be white noise is always in the foreground, and what will heal us, bring light to our work/art, and foster connection and intimacy is something we have to listen to/for actively. We are made in and through these intimacies that we've forgotten how to engage in. So maybe the question to start with is: what are your intimacies? Or, what do you carry that you wish you could share? That's a genuine vulnerability and fear because we have been brainwashed to idolize hyper-independence and self-made[ness], which is just refusing to acknowledge that we are made of one another, of particular familiarities as opposed to these lavish achievements. So there's this sponge-like quality of being permeable in our vulnerability. We must be willing to let someone else's light and darkness enter our lives. [see Mikko Harvey’s: The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.]

The hardest thing about welcoming difficult emotions is that we're [ culturally] condemned to try to deal with them privately. On our own, we will never open that door fully because they're too difficult a guest. So I think it's my job not just to be a good host to my sadness, joy, and despair - but to your sorrows, happiness, and grief. I think that’s everyone’s [true] task - to help others touch the heart of things. Otherwise, none of us can establish a form of intimacy or faculty with that simultaneous presence and emptiness without the others' hands holding us up. When we try to do it alone - we're left with that thin veneer of survival, performative vulnerability without transformation, just getting by - we’re basically pouring salt into the same wound over and over until we become septic from hypernatremia. The problem is we're taught we should endure grief but not that we should allow it to ripen and transform us. Either we engage it or try to outrun it - but of course, the trick is that it's impossible to outrun! It's got more feet [and teeth] than we do - it's much faster, and there's no way to avoid it in our lifetime. The psychologist James Hellman said the issue is never about resolution but spaciousness. It's about how large we can become by trying to get our arms, and perhaps when our arms can’t reach any further, our wings around these impossible questions. It’s not about having answers, but our ability to hold and touch difficult things without having a perfect solution or offering a trite platitude.

I'm coming to realize there's a direct relationship between the breadth of our sorrow and the capacity of our joy. If we mitigate - if we silence that grief, we also collapse the register of joy - which I can't live without. And joy is an imperative faculty in my life. Which is really what this essay is about. And I'm sure some of you are asking, how can you be talking about/pivoting to joy right now? Perhaps that's because we were conditioned to believe that joy and delight are not deep emotions. It's impossible to imagine, much less comprehend, the rigor behind those skills until we attempt to bring them into our lives [out of necessity]. In his Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay offers a more enlightened version of joy that I have exclusively found in communities of recovery: which is the light that emanates from us when we help each other carry our sorrows. We're porous beings. Beauty hurts [Rilke believed this so much that he said we're barely able to endure it]. Attachments are painful. But they both transcend time and space so that we can meet in the intersection of eternity and the here & now. I believe every gesture happens within that fullness, the kind Weil was talking about with "The divine emptiness, fuller than fullness, has come to inhabit us." & "Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes the void." In his latest book, Inciting Joy, Gay skillfully grounds Weil's inquiry like he was fielding it with a baseball mitt and asks: "What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?" Such revelations invite a "soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing" of grief as the "metabolization of change."

Gay believes, as do I, that joy can, and perhaps only truly emerges" [...] from our common sorrow—which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow—might draw us together. .[..] It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive."

Obsession, isolation, and addiction all orbit a singular point or fixation on shame, loneliness, depression, hopelessness, or grief - and the tighter our orbit, the harder it is to escape that trajectory. At some point, everyone has found themselves unable to escape the gravity of immense loss - and all we can do at this point is hold on for dear life and pray we will end up on the other side of it. Of course, despite our best efforts, we will always return to the thing, but that gravity can only rip us apart if we remain untethered from each other. And I'm discovering that while it might be a little uncomfortable, these small needful acts of paying attention, asking questions, delighting in and with each other, and being a little cringe can and will stitch us together. Like this small gift of a text from my friend, Leah live quoting Ada Limon's Q&A from Transylvania University earlier this week: "You love this world. You are in it. Don't miss it."

The deepest joys are those we share, and I don't want to miss them. I love you. Our friendship is a miracle. As Rilke wrote, I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart; just as I hold you in mine. 

PS: please send me your favorite poem. 

“Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from our [lost] loved one[s], and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself.”

I was telling my therapist recently that I keep returning to the neverending story’s “nothing is lost, everything is transformed” & I don’t know if that’s true or feasible, but it is still the target.

It is still the target.

Know that like life, I have not forgotten you, and hold you [ and our friendships ] in the palm of my hand:

here are some poems for our even-month essay gap:

[ Look, that’s where we are ]

This drives my body to lie in the middle of the wet road. It is what quiets my world. Sometimes, I am not interested in what Mary, or Rilke, says about grief. I don’t want a framework or solution. I want wrists and arms. I don’t want a theory; I want the poem to live in me. I want it to unfurl like a ballad while eating its seven courses. You know -  the song that goes to eleven. I want the light to stake me, to catapult me into the clouds. I want to sink into the rhythm of love. Feel its breath running down my neck. When yes opens to yes - when close isn’t close enough - the only time when time slows down. God, perhaps this is that winning pass / when the cornerbacks are too shocked to react. The world bites down on them, and they can't say a thing. The world has everyone in its mouth - and it’s chewing / while it digs another hole in your yard.

and it's up to you to fill it with rain / will you do something useful with your sorrow? you have to find a single flower in this grave / strange, the last luna moth that clamored against our shared window - dried between the pages of my copy of a thousand mornings, staining the page with its flattened body-its outline, a crusty halo around the time Percy came back. All stories are, in some form, prayers - the way I circled the deck in search of a place to park, now I circle the yard howling a name without a name. But who am I to believe I know enough to call this enough? The boat hammers against the dock it's tied to. Your mother touches my cheek and leaves my tears for me. Our memories are everything that remains besides the remains of you. 

Two people I loved refused to die in the city they grew up in before they died in the city they grew up in. Next year - the passenger beside me on the plane will hold my trembling hand. They’ll want to know if I’m afraid to fly. Someone will ask where I am going once we land. I will tell them that I am going to say goodbye - I will tell them again / for the last time. 

My grief is shrieking.  
My orbit changing.
The center does not hold -
Sadness, too, can fall apart. 

Something in me is blooming. 
Even in winter. 
Even in this dark.

[ triple texting but there's no pressure to respond ]

I think all I'm asking /
is for you /
to hold to /
the possibility of tomorrow.

Hold onto that breath.
Don't expel
the despair
unless
you're going to make room,

I won't leave until you come back from the dead. We already came back from the brink, I'm just asking, can you come back, a bit farther? This revival / could be a city. This grief / could fill a graveyard. This text could be the shovel that hits the missing link.

I left all of the lights on
when I stepped out at dusk.
Leave me a shoebox full of love
letters like the treasure maps we used to dream about.
We used to dream. We used to do a lot of
things. Put your hand on the door, your mouth to that hand, pick up the delivery I sent you. I know things are heavy. I'm going to be in the YVR terminal again. That terminal. Let's take the light in. Like a knee to the chest. Like a blessing. Listen, they're playing our song over and over. I'll leave the lights on. Keep talking. Put your hands out / in the dark if you must. I'll keep walking toward whatever hasn't turned to dust.

[exultations for the living/spring 2017 ]

When I think of how you move
when you enter a room, how the dusk
enters you;
when you step out into the night,
and the night sky falls into your hair
when I think of how you stand
as if with everything
and nothing in your hands
and how I have nothing to offer you now
save this wild and beautiful emptiness

When I think of how you leave
the air untouched
and how you came into the world
my grief had wrecked
and made it shine again
simply by walking slowly toward
and beside me in the dark
Best friends, my loves, I believe
this life is still a miracle.

[ Astigmatism ]

Sitting in my doctor's office, and I want to
Praise the miracle of science
that allowed me to touch you
before I ever touched you,

telegraphed our palm’s heat
& contrasted auras,
assured us of the heavens in our chests
that chases the precious pulse
solely holding back death & its chariot.

And still, I have to praise
Every spell
I have yet 
to take / on faith
Praise the witchcraft
that chooses the lucky
and the willing

Praise the nurse
down the hall
who asked me to dress
into something bare

held the moonlight
when it caught
the slope of my neck
traced my shoulders as they loosened
their heaviness into tomorrow's dawn.

Praise the marvel of a love
I have yet to discover or bury.
Praise the miracle of your 7 shades of hair.

This bright longing.
Everyone's fingers tightening.
around the carbon fiber
as we tunnel through more distance & dark.

I can almost see you.
every ghost glaring through the glass
grief gleaming into glaze 
Can I heed the warning,
or is it simply a reminder ?

that subjects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

[ instead of moaning, inform them that, unfortunately, Flash 9 is required to listen to audio ]

I wake up in this gift of a body I have always disdained
& throw a hail mary across my collarbone
since no one else 
is here to do it

I think it’s because
I have never imagined
myself holy
or prayed
to be forgiven
for wanting
because I have never asked
heaven for anything

like deliverance
save every blessing,
save the hunger
I have / for life,

please, another day,
I want to be,
here & now
loved & loving
like I have always been

My want fills every forest
with the green
of longing
with a kiss, an offering
of barrelled hips and thighs,
and twenty sighs after another
& god takes their time
or [an] eternity
to answer

I’ve been (re) reading a lot of Simone Weil recently [unmixed attention is prayer], and about ten minutes after I took this photo, I had to ask myself: “is it loneliness if I want to be witnessed in the midst of it?” There is freedom and wonder in recognition - but there is also a terribleness to it. We get used to holding things that would be painful for anyone else to touch. But protecting our private despair doesn’t heal it - we just lug it. Anyone who’s carried unmetabolized grief for years knows that isn’t sustainable. The psychiatrist R.D. Laing proposed that we arrive here as Stone Age children. He believed we inherited the entire lineage of our species. So we’re carrying all of this generational [and for some - systematic] grief in addition to our own. And yet, it’s “normal” to cry alone after seeking out an abandoned parking lot or quiet room —or not to cry at all. I’m fascinated by this concept of ritual grief, where you go off by yourself to weep, and when you return, the group welcomes you back (wtf) and thanks you for helping to empty the communal cup of sorrow. How many of us have ever been thanked for our grief before? We think of grief as a burden we lay on someone else. But what if, as Mary Oliver said about that box of darkness, it’s a gift?

I’m trying to learn how to take in a landscape without trying to change it. I want to touch your sorrow without trying to solve it. I want to hold the feathers stuck between your shoulder blades and return them to you tarless. Like my therapist told me: “it’s not a (binary) question of whether we believe we’re worthy of love, desire, intimacy, and belonging - it’s a question of how much” We are all coming to realize [like Weil] that: “[...] the soul knows for certain only that it is hungry….The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.” We are aching to break that spell of denied hunger, desperate to go into these hidden places, and sometimes someone’s cup is so full, they’re going to spill it before they get there. So I’m trying to facilitate the moment when everyone in my life has permission to say, “This is who I am. This is what I carry”. Because I know that’s a life-changing, life-saving event. At some point in our lives, we each have been painfully exiled through prejudice, contempt, or our own (or others') failings, but sometimes, we are ostracized by a transformation that doesn’t include us. Each of these is uniquely painful and heartbreaking - but I am learning to find the offering in “Your past is not a threat. It’s what brought you to me.” 

I think that miracle of sitting here with you can be enough. It’s all in what we often fail to notice. After reading Ross Gay’s “Book of Delights,” I also developed a personal delight radar in [what I used to think were] simple and mundane things - because I was too distracted to pay attention to a sunset or a poem that could break my heart. Rilke was convinced that “[…]the Spring-times needed you deeply. Many a star / must have been there for you so you might feel it. A wave / lifted towards you out of the past, or, as you walked /past an open window, a violin / gave of itself. All this was their mission. / But could you handle it? Were you not always. Still, distracted? [...]” - You know? The moon needs you to breathe it into your lungs. Your friend needs you to leave them a messy voicemail about how much you love them. Everyone who treasures you wants something from you that will last, that they can hold and carry in their heart. We’re blocked from seeing and engaging with what’s around us because we’re always looking for something else. That’s our plight as humans; it seems, doesn’t it? Looking for what isn’t there instead of what is - hellbent on getting back what we’ve lost. Immense loss and sorrow came around, and they threw us to the ground into the depths of confusion and bewilderment, maybe into extreme isolation, depression, addiction, and shame. But I don’t think it was out of some sadistic cosmic horror but out of a necessity to weave the dark parts into our being. He [Rilke] also said God is ripening even when we don’t desire it. I want to believe there’s another phase after that - when and if we’re willing, everything can change beyond recognition. 

Perhaps, this is [Ada] Limón's driving conviction in her latest collection [The Hurting Kind] — that to be "eyed" by someone is to be an "I." 

To be made whole
by being not a witness,
But witnessed.

Of course, the tears [and reprieve] might not come at that moment. It’s impossible to [authentically] cry on demand. Even in a small circle of trusted friends, perhaps only a few of us might grieve. But the others can support those individuals and thank them heartily—because they helped everyone. And the next time, it might be you or me. I am trying to learn how to think like a village. The ritual isn’t just about me doing my work; it’s about making it possible for others to do theirs. We all need attention from the group; there’s nothing wrong with that [as much as my inner critic/perfectionist tries to negate it]. We also need to grant attention, to bear witness. Nearly every interior experience is informed or was started by [an] exterior experience. So it feels like it’s constantly swirling around, but I don’t have a measured, thematic way of understanding [the inexplicable] other than framing it as a conviction. We’re all in a perpetual struggle between the selves we must put out in the world and the ones who want to cultivate our inner silence. It’s a challenging balance, living in this world with all its distractions, animosity, and traumas while nurturing the creative self from which the heart speaks. I’m not sure it’s possible to find a permanent balance, but it’s impossible to continue making art without that ebb and flow. I’m great, perhaps too good, at taking care of that part of myself that is essential only to me. The world doesn’t care! And I don’t care because I don’t want to connect with everyone, which can make it harder to insist upon a calling (especially any form of healing) if the demand only seems to come from within, which my therapist would say is a cognitive distortion [because the world does need it!]. Our task is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. These emotions are infinite and incomplete, and very few things can hold that kind of dialectic energy - willingness is the only thing I can think of outside a prayer or poem.

Keats and Blake described the soul as the physical medium from which we can speak the truth about our lives. That version of the soul invites the marginal, excluded, and unwelcome pieces of ourselves into attention. It’s found at the edges, in culture, and in our lives. It takes us down into the places of our shared humanity: sorrow and longing, suffering and death. The language of the heart requires us to be authentic, revealing what lies behind the image we try to show the world, including our flaws and peculiarities. This manifestation doesn’t care at all about perfection or getting it right. It cares about participation. Our soul is revealed in dreams, reflections, and images, our most intimate conversations, and our desire to live a life of meaning and purpose.

I want to defend the future possibility of some words appearing on the page that will be equal to these times and to what I feel and what you feel - that is, we all are wrestling an angel who’s got us by the throat. My lit professors argue against silence and intellectual obfuscation. They say: tell us how it feels. Well, we are trying. I am trying. But as DeLillo dramatized [in White Noise], it is nearly impossible to discuss feelings with video reels [I never asked to see] playing loudly, crying so operatically - that you cannot hear the quiet breaking of someone else’s heart. Yet, every poet I love continues to manage this nifty trick of reclaiming sentiment from TV’s and TikTok’s blight against all things soulful and human. I would applaud for their [supposedly] small yet significant triumphs. They work to keep both sides of the equation - brain and heart - present on the page and in my life. It forces me to lie down where Yeats said all the ladders start  - in that foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  It’s our moral obligation to be revolutionaries, to engage, grieve, be enraged and saddened - while offering praise, practicing delight, and tending compassion and joy. It’s exhausting work, but a heart that does not deal with its sorrow will harden to the world's wonders and evils, and I don’t want to miss out on the wonder. If there’s a better road out there, I want us to build it. If there’s a light at the end of the [last] tunnel, I want to swallow it.  Whatever mystery lies ahead - I want to echo Ada’s praise chorus [even] into the inevitable darkness -  “Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf - unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.”

author’s note: this essay is a semi-continuation of

a noise like wings

If Only We Would Allow It

What is there left to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. […] I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. - Stanley Kunitz I'm not there yet, but I want to be able to pass through dimensions with ease. This type of transparency is where I'm headed. I want to take allegori…

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6 years ago · Troy McCall

&

a noise like wings

The Veil of the Soul-Making

the deeper the sorrow the greater the joy -William Blake Grief has always been, in our entire story as a species, until the industrialist and capitalist age, a communal process. In ancient Scandinavia, it was common to spend a prolonged period “living in the ashes.” Not much was expected of you while you did the essential (grief) work of transforming…

Read more

6 years ago · Troy McCall

I spent last night on my driveway, staring at the moon, listening to the same four songs by Kacy Hill on a loop. There are things about the individual life I treasure and perhaps, selfishly, am not willing to surrender [yet]. My therapist and I have been working through my defects recently. All of which stem from a distorted sense of hyper-individualism and independence. Talking about a struggle after I've mastered it or come out on the other side isn't a form of vulnerability - it's re-packaged perfectionism. She asks why I carry particular things (sustained grief/chronic illness) alone, and I tell her it's easier for me to bear than to show someone else where they need to grasp or lift. Everyone is past their capacity, and I don't feel neglected. She asks me if that's denial or if I've just cut off the part that wants to be seen. I give her the side-eye, and we both start cackling. She knows I'll allow it, to an extent, by a select few. The problem is that I want to control the light that I'm seen by. Most of the time, I'd prefer to maintain my [sense of] independence and individualism and occasionally be coveted by a coterie of former/almost lovers than loved by someone new.

Bess rhetorically asks me if I've idolized Jane Eyre. We talk about that inward treasure [born with me], which has kept me alive when all extraneous delights were withheld or offered only at a price I could not afford to give. I ask her if she thinks I'm hoarding it like a dragon. She snorts. I feel a twinge of guilt in my chest. We return to Rilke's "I'm still alive, I have time to build My blood will outlast the rose." She knows when I first got sober, I needed time to build a life that wasn't painful to live. Then I met someone and started a life with them, only to have it crumble and rebuild (again). And I have spent half a decade building these marvelous rooms in this fourth house that are/were only meant for me. But now, I think I'm supposed to create rooms in my life that are meant to be shared - like a kitchen, sunroom, and greenhouse. And the problem is - deep down, part of me wants to build another private room. 

She tells me that I have to decide what I want. I tell her I want to be left alone more than I want to be loved. She asks me if I'm willing for that to change - I tell her if my life has made me anything, it has made me that. But, of course, there are times that I desire being known so much that I feel disjointed - but I don't let it rip me apart. Ocean Vuong wrote that loneliness is still time spent with the world. I believe anything that goes on forever can be good, and when it's no longer good - it can still be useful ["The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree"]. Esther Perel talks about how love wants us to see every facet of each other, but desire requires mystery. Maybe my problem is I'd prefer to remain a mystery. Only unlocked by someone more fated than I. 

Want is a part of everything. We want - all the time. We are engines of want and desire. Sometimes I feel I'm a 6-ft gear turning over and over. "Please let this treatment work. Let me have this one thing." Every prayer is a form of desire, even in its most generous or selfless state [please bring another person healing or peace]. I think it's essential to name and talk about passion, need, and longing because when we do, we can begin to see if it's tormenting or refining us? Sometimes longing is a good thing, the longing to live, to feel good, to heal society, and sometimes longing is detrimental because we get on that hedonistic treadmill and can't get off. We want more and more and more. So I love interrogating desire as a way of exploring what I'm experiencing, sometimes it's true longing, and sometimes it's my way of making myself suffer for no reason. Sometimes I re-invent desire amid my suffering, so it feels tantric. But that can only last for so long before the pain bites back.

Which I feel is a place we're all back in, again. More prolonged and, at times, painful waiting. Keats called it negative capability, dwelling with uncertainty without grasping at - or crystalizing around an easy solution. Poems (by Rilke, Mary Oliver, & Gregory Orr) often ask us to live there, and it's unbearable, especially when we had no practice (till recently). Especially if we stopped reading or hadn't gone off by ourselves to sit alone for a while, even those who write and read all the time were rushing around before March of 2020. So this forced dwelling, semi-stagnation, not fully comprehending something instantly, is extraordinarily difficult. Because we have to allow these uncomfortable and challenging truths to marinate and perhaps- even pierce us while they transform us. And anything that pushes us into the depths of our being is tough to bear. I find it hard to reach those places entirely by myself. Sometimes I read an essay or poem so beautiful that I have to shut it or close my laptop and walk outside because it stakes me. Sometimes it touches something that has bruised me and I can't stand it. "Oh no! This is going to drive me into my heart." But, a few days later, I can say, "All right," and I surrender to it: "Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. And when I no longer want it - keep doing it to me until my desire to be changed cleaves and grows like antlers, and I can begin - all over again."

Bess asks me what I want, and I tell her I want this pandemic to end. I want to be more revolutionary. I want to stop worrying about new variants and getting blood drawn every six weeks for immuno-response tests. I want healthcare that doesn't have me pay for experimental treatment out-of-pocket. She asks me what I want after that, and I tell her I have no idea (besides climbing another mountain and kissing someone in the rain) - but that enthralls me. I just want to get there. I want to be out of my own way for whenever the road clears.

• stop using chrome, and swap to Firefox - on desktop and mobile (use firefox focus on mobile)

• use https://duckduckgo.com instead of Google as your default search engine [https://appletoolbox.com/change-default-search-engine-iphone-browser/]

• when doing research or activism use: https://www.torproject.org

• NEVER visit your blog or login to your social/email/work/personal accounts while browsing with tor

Recommended Firefox extensions:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/https-everywhere/

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/

consider running:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

  • this will break 95% of sites bc the modern web uses javascript, but javascript is also how most modern trackers work

• blocking 1st part cookies: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-firefox-tracking-protection?redirectslug=disable-third-party-cookies&redirectlocale=en-US

  • always block 3rd party cookies, blocking 1st party cookies will also break sites

Email: 

• stop using google suite (Gmail especially) if possible, especially for anything health/political related ( use https://proton.me/mail )

• have unique https://proton.me/mail emails for health, political, and personal - never ever email across those accounts, or share contacts across accounts, forward messages, etc 

• use a service like https://relay.firefox.com to conceal your actual email address:

Secure Messaging Tools

• https://signal.org

• https://getconfide.com

• stop using SMS/iMessage - Whatsapp is ok for 1-to-1, but it’s not safe for group chats

• do not use telegram, slack, discord, or direct messages on social platforms for any sensitive conversations

• never click on links from SMS [https://www.bejarano.io/sms-phishing/]

Account Security:

• use 2FA - ideally a physical key https://www.yubico.com/products/

• use a password safe like https://1password.com/

• use complex passwords that do not repeat

DNS

if you are familiar with Docker/Linux I highly recommend using:

• https://pi-hole.net

• https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Alternative:

• https://1.1.1.1 is a decent fallback option, but doesn’t have any blocking, and is operated by Cloudflare

• use a VPN service that has an ad-blocking add-on: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ad-blocking-vpn

Gmail/Youtube/Google History

• run security checkup: https://myaccount.google.com/security-checkup

• delete and turn off all your history for your google account (web/app, location & youtube): https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Health/Fitness/Data Trackers

• disable and delete as fast as possible, Fitbit and Apple watches already track your period/sleeping/health habits which could be leveraged against you

• buy reproductive healthcare products with cash locally, stop buying pads/tampons/condoms, etc on amazon 

Phone Privacy

delete TikTok, please: https://news.yahoo.com/tiktok-employees-china-secret-access-135758775.html

• Android:

  • https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/29/android-privacy-settings/

  • https://www.wired.com/story/android-12-privacy-settings-updates/

• iPhone:

  • https://nordvpn.com/blog/iphone-location-history/

  • https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-built-in-security-and-privacy-protections-iph6e7d349d1/ios

  • https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/guides/iphone-privacy-tips/

Protecting your identity/accounts

• create a unique user on your computer for protected browsing, always browse connected to a VPN + Tor, and never log in to any of your personal accounts (social, Slack, Spotify, etc). 

• check your passwords and email addresses on https://haveibeenpwned.com/

• try to keep your online identities as compartmentalized as possible 

VPN:

• look at using a VPN service that doesn’t log data

  • https://www.privateinternetaccess.com (what I use)

  • https://nordvpn.com/

  • https://protonvpn.com/

macOS

• use FileVault to encrypt your hard drive: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204837

• turn on the built-in firewall: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/block-connections-to-your-mac-with-a-firewall-mh34041

• consider using these security tools: https://objective-see.org/

• INSTALL YOUR SECURITY UPDATES 

additional resources

• https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

• https://digitaldefensefund.org/

• https://ssd.eff.org/module-categories/basics

• https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/security-and-privacy-tips-people-seeking-abortion

• https://poets.org/poem/instructions-not-giving

• https://astra-mag.com/articles/against-nostalgia/

I've been falling asleep recently, clutching Michelle Zauner's "Crying in H Mart" on my second time through, and every line plants itself further into my heart. I need these stories to line my soul like arrowroot to nourish me. So something extraordinary can grow in the holes [isn't this why life has done all this digging? To make room?]. Knowing every harrowing tale, terrible loss, and night of inconsolable pain can still be miraculous because we also get to live into the total transformation [and need to make impactful art] that comes as a result - if we're willing.

Given the chance, I'd run through these thresholds repeatedly until I am unimaginably changed [all over again]. To be human is to know the terrible and beautiful things in each of us, and they want out! The things inside of me want room to run. They want a room with the golden hour for a wall and a waterfall for a door. More and more, I am coming to understand why every angel begins by telling us not to fear and why our salvation can only be worked out with trembling celerity. Since willingness is often the result of sustained crises [desperation and loss], perhaps transmutation can be the alchemy from which heterogeneous grace irradiates. That is to say - there is a burning mystery at work in each of us that we will not comprehend until it is completed. 

I still believe in and rely on [deep] interrogation, but I don't think we should solve everything anymore. At least I don't need to. There is a point where knowledge will fail us, and I know this sounds insane coming from an apostate, but occasionally faith that surpasses all understanding can be the correct choice. Despite all the evidence, despite what I know, I believe this life is still both a miracle and an offering simply because I am still breathing. 

If you know my story, you know that I am a statistical anomaly. Not just with the 3-4 times I've bounced back from the brink with my auto-immune condition or the long-term recovery rates for former heroin addicts, but the amount of violence I endured in active addiction. And I don't have any answers for why I'm still here and why I've been extended so much grace and time while others - arguably, more deserving of it than I [considering how much I've already been given] - were denied it. What I do know is it has endowed me with an infinite tenderness for everything and everyone in my life. As Jorie Graham writes in her poem "Prayer": 

This is the force of faith. Nobody gets  
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. 

Every time I read that, I get chills. I want to scream, dance, and cry all at the same time! Someone plugged my spine into a light socket. She stakes us with this surrender, the part of us that had forgotten what it's like to be pierced by the light. What it's like for hope to make room. I forgot what it's like to make room. Sometimes I'll stand outside in my garden holding a book by Marie Howe or Ada Limon to my chest - even though I've already memorized every word [currently, "The Spell" ] - because there's always a part of me that needs to be touched, hugged and held. The same part of me that's always searching for meaning and reason[s]. As Dickison said, aren't we all out with lanterns, looking for ourselves [and others]?

What I'm interested in the most is how people [continue to] live. I miss in-person 12-step meetings because I want to hear that first-person testimony - especially when someone stops asking to be restored and prays to be transformed. In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau denoted that his book was going to be like every other book we've read, except there would be more first person singular in it. More "I" words, more "I" sentences. He said, "We commonly forget that it is always the first person speaking." And that is a wonderful tongue-in-cheek way of saying that individual subjectivity is deeply entangled within. Meaning is ever-changing, and it's also recursive. There are very few things that can hold that kind of quantum energy. Poetry and music, absolutely - but I want to hold them in my body, in my being. 

​​I'm still learning how to write about wonder and delight. Although I am trying to take more than a few pages on these subjects from Ross Gay who wrote:

Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

I know how to write about grief, struggle, and even desire, but I don't know how to write about blessedness or fear. Exhaustion is the biggest thing that silences me. And it's taken me a while to write this essay because I was exhausted from this round of biologic treatments and overwhelmed by the state of the world, like almost everyone. There were a few months when I was rejecting my treatment almost completely and bleeding internally so much that I became anemic. And for the first time, in the 9 years that I've been sick, I was able to actually tell some people [outside of my primary care team, and parents] that my health wasn't great, after some serious conviction and prodding from my therapist. And through that practice, mostly through sending voice memos over Whatsapp - what I was able to see, and hold onto, was that the world and my beloved are going to go on - and I can still be a lasting testament in your hearts. One day, hopefully, a long time from now, but one day I'm going into the ground, and you're going to go on without me. The trees are going to keep living - and something will bloom from my body, and when that thing dies, there will be more trees and mountains that are going to come. And that ongoingness of the world is really, in some ways, a relief. Because I want to be part of a system that's life-giving and breathing. I want to be part of something bigger than me, which means that I want to be a part of you. 

So now, when I frame Jorie's kind of surrender, it means giving in to that timelessness. Knowing that I won't be here forever, but part of me will live on in others - and trusting whatever form that takes. So surrender means not clinging to this notion that I have to protect everyone from eventually watching my body eat itself, but finding some way to release my grip on how I want to be perceived [in the end]. And, of course, when you release your grip, you notice what you're attached to, the things you miss, and the things you love. And I think I need to start writing more out of missing, honoring, and wanting to bear witness to this life in a way that isn't, perhaps, as perfectionistic or hyper-independent.

And the only way I know how to do that is to close this essay with a [new] poem. Be gentle with yourselves and others; I love you. 

Say we remain unlaced
by what we can never know.
Say we pray / to a crumbling glacier, 
halved our grief, and ate the honey in the middle.

Say we breathed
the crescent moon
right into / our lungs.

Say the loss
never goes rigid inside the throat
when it's shared.

Say we cleaved our wings with a hatchet.
Say here is the hammer / we have time to build.
Say the light will rise like a flood
if we let it choose the window.

PS: I will be done with this round of immunosuppressive therapy in June and hopefully will be able to travel/rejoin the world.

I keep coming back to this remarkable essay on Rothko's Chapel I read last week: There is a place in the heart which does not belong entirely to life. There is no other place. Rothko paints a stillness which moves. "You are in it," he said. "It isn't something you can command." So long as we look, and continue to look, the form slips from our gaze. Perhaps this is all that form allows: space to bear it, for a flash.

It reminds me of another Rothko quote that I've clung to, [genuine art] "is an immediate transaction; it takes you into it." I love that concept. Nearly all of my failures have revolved around attempting to bring something into me. As if being in love, in recovery, and an artist were things I could choke down. It's easy to laugh at it now because I can be in the ocean of experience and feeling vs. trying to swallow it. Whenever I'm trying to consume something too big for me, I hear Sharon Olds say: "and my job is to eat the whole car / of my anger, part by part, some parts/ground down to steel-dust." and I can start laughing at myself, and in turn surrender to whatever that giant thing is. Or suppose it's something I shouldn't surrender to [ domination, hopelessness, fear ]. In that case, I can focus on tangible actions like paying for an Airbnb in Ukraine that I'm not going to stay in and hassling my reps over the phone 3x a week to provide direct aid —knowing that it's not enough and still trusting that the slightest ripple can reverberate into waves. 

When I first got sick, back in 2014, long before we found an effective treatment for my autoimmune disorder, I made a similar call to the desk clerk at the Stanford Anderson Collection and asked about viewing Rothko's "Untitled (Black and Gray)." They told me an almost identical story about this painting - that only terminally ill people ever request to view this piece [or occasionally someone who had cancer and just found out they were in remission]. I make a joke about dying to see it. The chuckle on the end of the line is soft but holds compassion fatigue. They need more than the two coins I have to offer. Years later, after finding said miracle treatment, I sat down in front of that painting, let myself be taken into it [instead of trying to take it into my being], and wept. My body wasn't eating itself anymore, but part of me still had to die there so another could go on. I had to let go of the life I'd imagined for myself to make room for the one that I'd been given. To quote my second sponsor, "anyone who is granted wings is gonna need a wider door." 

It feels messy, ungrateful, and borderline narcissistic even to imply that grace has a weight. And yet - anything given must have a form. Rilke wrote: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying." Grace shifts both the light and the gravity in the room. At times, that grace can seem to point or exude from a person, which it does - but it also comes from beyond them. Bless our holy kneecaps should we ever forget or remiss the fact that it was never ours [to begin with]. 

Prior to the pandemic, I volunteered at hospitals as a crisis counselor [after being trained and licensed], which mostly involved helping drug addicts into recovery or sexual assault survivors feel safe [because I also share those histories, and it is my calling to be a light out of that darkness] - but occasionally, it meant sitting with someone who was dying. And you know what they each feared more than death? That they hadn't lived/loved enough and that they'd be forgotten. 

Most of us have had the notion that we [and our beloveds] will die peacefully at a ripe old age, but that's not remotely the case - it only happens if you're incredibly fortunate. More often, it's a person in their 20s, 30s, 40s, or a child trying to come to terms with the fact they aren't going to live much longer. And it's always unfair, cosmically unjust, and without answers. This is where the experience of listening, being able to be present - and willingness to walk into the cold dark when these impossible questions ["why me?", "why them?"] are asked. Knowing there isn't a reply but an invitation - to look past the need for a solution to a more profound truth, which is to say - that there's a consciousness that extends beyond our mortal bodies. You could call it a soul. Many do. But to me, every beloved who has passed is more [of], as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: "...a burning lamp [...], a flame / The wind cannot blow out, and I shall hold you / High in my hand against whatever darkness." 

Framing grief in this manner is essential for me. Because I have to believe that someday, grief and even [general/regular] sadness can [once again] become windows - and they will allow me to see things I've never seen before. I have to trust, with the pulled back bow of my spine, that like Rothko said - I am still in it, and the moment of transformation is not mine to command. Instead, it is mine to bear, witness, and welcome - no matter when or how it arrives on my doorstep. I have to leave the back door of my heart unlocked for the unexpected instead of the impossible [and someone who was never going to come home]. At the beginning of the pandemic, in an interview with Jordan Kisner, Leslie Jamison remarked about writing a piece inside one life and having it emerge in another, where the invisible is made visible. Not through abstraction but through earnestness that can stand on the shoulders of deep research, skepticism, interrogation, and [most importantly] - curiosity. Jamison believes, as do I, that the miracle of grace is finding solace in unexpected places [and times], which can only come from a place of willingness [see: packing our bags in the middle of the night and leaving our worst selves for our better ones ]. 

One of the hardest, bravest things to do right now, in any environment, be it a classroom or online, is to say, "I believe this is good. I have done the work and research. I have given it time to marinate. I have vetted it in my soul and in the souls of those I trust. I believe this thing so much that I can fully stand behind it." That's far more accessible than saying, "Here's everything that's wrong with that." You can duck behind anything when you're skeptical. But owning it is a form of surrender. You don't just lay down your weapons. You have to put yourself out there in front of the firing line. Sometimes I'm astonished that art ever gets made. But I'm interested in and fascinated by that kind of dynamic vulnerability.

The magic of art is that it can be so many different things, even simultaneously. We can't know them from the outset. We have to be caught off guard by them. They come at us from angles we weren't expecting. That sense of being surprised by life, amazed by solace, surprised by weird forms of connection, mysterious sources of refuge is one of the truths I believe is at the core of art [and why it moves us]. That perpetual discovery allows life to be complicated and capacious in a way that I can fully stand behind. Rilke called it an unfolding. And, in my heart of hearts, I believe that we've just begun to.

Perhaps, yes, this is all that form, and this epoch of unprecedented time allows - space for us to bear it [for an instant]. But with latitude for us to rise and fall - and rise again. Mirroring Maggie Nelson: "You have no idea / what kind of light you'll let in / when you drop the bowl, no idea /what will make you full." 

In "A Testament of Devotion," Thomas Kelly surmised that the soul always rescinds from soul-shaking, love-invaded times into more normal [perhaps acceptable western] states of consciousness. And yet "that one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must henceforth be forever determined by that Real." As Saint Augustine did not ask for greater certainty or evidence of God, but instead for more steadfastness in his belief - I do not ask for proof of what I know in my soul, only that I may return to the garden of what bridges yours and mine.  

With love,

T

Sometimes, I have to say it 3-4 times in a row before I believe it. And thank goodness that I have enough experience that it's possible to believe. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have a decade of evidence that this life can be rich like the soil.

I've lived into miracle after miracle, and the gaps between them have kept me willing. Yet, even in the monotony of this extended crisis, I still feel like I could overflow my bathtub with urgency every time I take a shower. This is because, dear friends, I have such an overwhelming desire to live. Part of being chronically ill means that I will always, always love and cling to life. Every day above ground continues to be a god-damned miracle. There was a period, early into my diagnosis, where I was losing my ability to swallow without consistent surgical intervention, and the type of mobility, autonomy, and convalescence I experience today (even with the sporadic autoimmune flare) was beyond fantasy. Doctor after doctor has told me I'm a medical marvel - and no one has responded to the (experimental FMT) treatment as well as I have.

To me, grace is many things, if not everything - a benediction and an obligation. Some days I don't know what I'm going to do with this wild and precious life, but I know that I must keep living it. With nearly two years into this pandemic and extreme isolation, all I'm attempting is trying to unpack something beautiful within myself - or at least unexpected. That freezing morning air is both a shock and a delight. But I'm learning that it's ok if it hurts at first, as long as it wakes me up more. I feel that way about Marie Howe's "This Is What the Living Do" because that poem grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me, shrieking, "You will never experience restitution or catharsis with someone in the ground!" while simultaneously showing me a new way to live. Poetry might be the only place, besides my body, that can say yes [yes, I surrender] to everything, including the inexplicable and unknowable. God help me if I ever stop being curious and willing. The first time I heard Bryan Stevenson say, "if you're not hopeful, you're part of the problem," I had to sit down because it rearranged my insides. I had to get down on my knees and pray (it doesn't matter to who or what) "Make me softer."  Because it's not what the world needs; it's what I need. 

I follow this Instagram account called "poetry is not a luxury," and I post/write a lot of poetry because I believe that words have the power to move, change, and heal us. But, if I'm (brutally) honest, I think they (poems) can only save the poet. Or they have to heal you first before they can heal anyone else. If we're lucky, they may help, move, inspire, or resonate with someone else. But I think it begins and ends with, "I wrote this poem or essay to save myself." Then, if - in some nearly divine-appointed series of events, those words become far more significant than me and reach someone else - it can be everything all over again, which is another cycle of life-saving and bringing. But I don't always know that that's going to happen. So I have to start with "How is this poem going to rescue me from grief or despair?" and "What will this essay unfold, reveal, or teach me?"

Sometimes the most comforting thing another poet/person can do for me is admit that they don't know shit either. There's always something waiting to shock us just beyond the horizon. It might even be the unknowable/impossible thing. It might be a spiderweb. As Ada Limón writes, it might be a "song that says my bones/ are your bones, and your bones are my bones,/ and isn't that enough?"

A song that says my bones
are your bones, 
and your bones are my bones,
and isn't that enough?

Even if it's not right now, I believe it can be. 

I love you. I miss you. And I’m looking towards the day that we can join each other.

Retrograde

I love fall weather, 
but not the season
I tell myself
As I fold my grief like fitted
bedsheets: fraying elastic, the faint
scent of the detergent you weren't allergic to
and my palms
holding the creases
against my skin, a way to live
into them. I am
folding. My sorrows 
to make room 
for something bigger
hopefully better
don’t ask me
for any precision
other than my hands
against your hands
These are our mountains—
of holding
a mountain of folds smoothed out for the moon, and you, 
and the impossible season Mercury makes of two.

Angels in America (after Canadian Customs)

Once again, someone always falls in, Christ, I think it's the second coming – of two bodies, of four blue eyes, six green eyes, and eight brown eyes - say we count those reflected in the mirror of the past [at midnight, in the purest dark, in anyone's grief].

I haven't been able to recognize the voice of your old silence or see the heavenly messages scrawled in the middle of a manic state where our bodies were glass, and from ourselves, we drank a type of impossible water.

Desire needlessly spills over me, a cursed tonic. For my thirsty thirst, what can the promise of your forever-closed eyes do? I speak of something no longer in this world. I speak to someone who lies - both within and without me.

And I am drenched, naked in memory of that white night. So possessed, we made love that whole time, a spell that five years conspired to break.

Can we suffer too much reality in the space of this secret dusk? I undress, every night, without you. Horrified by the vastness of my want: to live alone, to bring you back. But not of what's in front of me. Or of the mirror that pounds. This clock, the laceration that reaches back through time, from which my desire, love, and cry pour out. 

The night will open itself at least once.
It's enough.
You see.
You've seen
the end of all things.

The ecstasy of being one,
then two in the mirror,
and suddenly you're six
feet below ground.

But, then, to speak 
of this final discovery:
I was the one dying 
when you left

Now each night, 
I plead with God if 
he will cling these wings
and grant you the grace
that grew in your place

And I wonder if your mother would ask:
do you still weep for Melissa at night?
But I refuse to cry anymore in this poem
So I tell the dark a story
that we both can believe

One day, I don't know when, someone decided to call desire a set of strange, indescribable physical phenomena - be it pain, hunger, perhaps both entwined - but from that moment when the scorching in our veins was named, the brutality of the strangeness is interrupted, and the ancient horror of reckless abandonment, hidden behind the new word, begins to be forgotten. 

Let's go back to before language. That's what [Marina] Tsvetaeva did. Let's go back to that disturbing age, the age of myths and folktales, the age of stone, of fire, of knives. Before language, there was and is a fire that bites but doesn't kill, the everlasting hunger that, like all pain, simultaneously exposes and separates us, making us seem strange to ourselves and our beloveds with all that begins with: "I want to fill my mouth with your name, but any part of you will do." 

Some forms of eroticism can only be characterized by an inexplicable acuity of terror. Like Rilke, we know that "Every Angel is terrifying." The sight of both blood and the holy, no doubt, is of the most developed of these horrors as, one is surprised to note, the fear of one's own terrible fragility. It seems impossible to judge our plaited doomedness using a word other than seductive since nothing is more attractive than the body of our beloved presented, flushed, and soaked in sweat. In such a manner, extreme seductiveness might reside at the boundary of horror. [It was always you: your unutterable name, this growl in my throat. // I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow.]. 

Most of the monsters lurking beneath the proverbial bed threaten us with destruction, not with the perhaps more frightening possibility of our becoming otherwise. But vampires, who are similar enough to remind us of ourselves yet alien enough to disconcert us, torment us with a particular brand of existential violence: they undermine our certainty in current iterations of ourselves. For centuries, they have peered into mirrors only to discover that they lack a reflection — the makings of an identity crisis if there ever was one. It is increasingly apparent that the makings of something human are present in them — and more alarmingly that the makings of something vampiric are present in us. 

Perhaps this is why the forbidden can be nearly knee-buckling erogenous. I don't mean the simple desire for sex, but desire as the quest for agency, connectedness, aliveness, and vibrancy. How do we reconcile our repressed desires, denied selves, fundamental human needs of security and adventure, commitment and freedom, intimacy and individuality? Are the pangs we feel the dynamic between safety/security and aliveness?

That inner hunger begins with the kept secret, with the silent separation from the rest of the world. It's a future crime against your own heart. And a form of glory. Love abjures to adore. Longing is a forest fire. It can burn right through your core. And if you burn long enough, the world will blister around you. That form of desire can feel monstrous, even though it's human. In "Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale," Kirk J. Schneider remarks: "This is also the message of classic horror: if a monster learns appropriate restraint, it can become an angel."

Some (grotesque) horror fans despise Flanagan's work because it's about horror but never directly. As the New York Times noted in a recent profile, "Flanagan has earned a reputation for what might be called humanistic horror ... while never skimping on the nightmare fuel, [he] believes that horror can offer something deeper."

The Haunting of Hill House is horrifying, not because the house itself is haunted, it's horrific because the monster isn't the monster; it's the manifestation of the character's (and in turn, the viewer's) grief, loss, pride, desire, and fear. The monster skulking in the shadows, the darkness at the edge of the woods, the haunted house that is too broken to be home—those are manifestations of events that grabbed onto the fabric of time in a fit of abject horror and clamped down so tightly that they couldn't keep moving forward toward resolution and eventual dissipation like they were supposed to. 

These metaphors revolve around the traumatized or neglected child and the mourning mother, the twist in your gut, and the little emptiness in your chest at the end of the day. All the little daily horrors we face but can't approach them directly enough to understand them. Gothic horror gives us these little metaphors as gifts and says, "Here, hold these for a while and see what you find." And all of these gifts require us to go back to our point of grief, denied desires and selves - and release them. We have to care, be curious, willing, and clever, and look for a way to heal the hurt. We have to be achingly human to survive. 

Most modern horror asserts that all hope is lost - and the fans who find that paradoxically comforting will despise Midnight Mass. Flanagan rejects that idea and leans into rationalism and humanism (not the belief in the divine, although influenced by it). Both what Riley and Father Paul (Monsignor Pruitt) have done are uniquely unforgivable. In the opening sequence, Riley willingly drives drunk, kills a young woman, and is plagued by guilt while doing his best to be useful after serving his sentence, knowing it will never be enough. In contrast, Paul poisons an entire town with a vampiric pathogen for the sake of rescuing his beloved from a hopeless state of mind and body. He doesn't feel any remorse; everything is a means to an end, and his goal so blinds him that he is unable to recognize the atrocities he is committing - until the very woman he came back to save shows him otherwise, not with contempt, but with love.

Being in recovery and having buried two intimate partners, I can relate to both of these characters. Regarding Riley, I've been clean for over a decade now. I am an active/practicing member of abstinence-based recovery programs, but it's important to note that the process of amends doesn't undo the harm I caused in active addiction. I never killed anyone, but I did ruin and poison lives (especially in the final years when I dealt to support my habit). I wrecked so much havoc on my body that it resulted in a chronic autoimmune disorder, which is likely how I'll meet my end. I've paid terrible costs and yet have been given a life of abundance. 

Is it possible to atone for every monstrous thing I've ever done? Will I ever be able to embody the grace that I've been extended? Perhaps, both atonement and grace are ongoing processes. It may never be my destiny to complete that work, but it is mine to continue. As For Monsignor Pruitt - I know, at the moment of my past beloved's death, I would have done anything to bring them back - even as a shadow, even as a dream. If there had been a way, I would've marched into hell to retrieve them. I would've pulled half the world into it with me if that was the cost. The enormity of our grief can lead us to justify terrible, awful things. These things are done, not in the name of love, but in it’s utter absence.

Cancel culture, which perhaps modern horror mirrors, says, "Nothing can redeem you. So roll over and die." Gothic humanism responds and says, "Perhaps what I've done is unforgivable, but I can stop contributing to harm, and maybe, just maybe - I can start making amends." The miracle of grace lies in the possibility of restoration, redemption, and transformative justice - fully knowing we don't deserve it, not in the actual act of being redeemed. And anyone who has never experienced grace (even secular clemency) or is open to its possibility will resent this story. 

Both grace and desire work through us, often despite our protests, and for this reason, they are better than we are. Certainly, desire alone can also be worse. But whatever its content, a true passion that stakes us is always noble in at least one regard, if only in virtue of its structure. Longing that plagues is the antithesis of the longing that's possessive. Genuine desire originates both within and without. Great sex elevates us to the extent that we agree on the manner of its (our) aim. To desire is always to risk total reinvention because the potential for revolution (burning up) is latent in the act of choosing desire itself. I believe we are not yet lost as long as we can want: wanting often pierces us while also giving us wings. 

Still, perhaps I will remain haunted by this image: sitting in the corner covered in blood, protected from the light coming through the window of a parish. Because like you, like any human-turned-vampire from hunger, I too know what it's like to be simultaneously thralled to, distressed, and drenched by the hot gore of my desire.  

And what, dear God, is on the other side of that desire? I want that too. My want is so wide I cannot cross it, [....] yet. 

As Maggie Nelson wrote:

"I'm not ashamed. Love is large and monstrous".

"Nothing is lost. . .Everything is transformed."

― Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

"Give me a call when you get a chance, my life is changing, and all our lives are changing, and maybe we can talk about it." Brooke relays that message to me over the phone in 2016 when I need it most, and I store that clip behind the fold of my right ear for nearly five years to retrieve it when everything turns upside down again. I always smile when I replay that memory; it makes me think of Lewis Hyde's The Gift and the doctrine that anything we hold onto too tightly [cling to with absolute ferocity] will die in our hands. I love that, but only because I had to learn to let go of what wasn't meant for me - before the rigor mortis set in. Or as the poet's poet Bob Hicok would tell us: My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers.

The concept of clinging to anything isn't just about possessiveness or fear of losing said thing. It's also holding to the notion that anything that's lost remains lost. Which isn't entirely true, and why we've all fallen for the absurd fantasy of "going back" at some point, which is just as ludicrous as actually combing the desert in Space Balls ["we ain't found shit!"]. When we lose someone we love, we always feel like we've lost a part of ourselves, yet do we ever fully lose the love we had for that person? Perhaps we do, if we keep trying to go back [picturing Lot’s wife turning into a column of salt]. But am I so bold [delirious] to presume that I could go up against the 1st law of thermodynamics and win?

I'm coming to realize [perhaps another joy and delight of getting older] is that deprivation and abundance have never really been separate. Loss and bereavement feel like voids, and yes, that's absolutely true, but I also like to imagine them more as widening the canvases of our lives - we just don’t know what to do with all that space. When I stopped doing heroin at age 25 after a near-fatal overdose, it made a moon-sized crater in my already devoid and traumatized life [no one becomes an opiate addict because their life is fulfilling]. It was a terrible vacancy, not just in the sense of the physical withdrawal, but because I had no idea how to live without it. And it was impossible to see at the time, but all that absence made room for a life of plenitude.

For the first few years of recovery, I was hellbent on "understanding" addiction. I read every neuroscience book and paper I could get my hands on. Then, after three years of research, I wrote my Master's thesis on the Epigenetic Mechanisms of Alcohol and Drug dependence. I talked openly about being an addict, but it was always framed in "I'm the kind of sick you can't fix." It was a ruptured syllogism: "If I understand myself, I'll get better, or I'll at least set expectations that are manageable" - But knowing what I was didn't give me any power, nor did it help me change my life, and ultimately made me question the way I'd come to idolize self-awareness itself, as a form of secular humanism: "Know yourself and act accordingly."  Inexplicably, it took me a few years to think about reversing that to: "Act, and know yourself differently." which is the driving force in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy [forest for the trees, sometimes, I swear]. 

Showing up for a meeting, therapy, coffee with a sponsee, or a service position — was an act that could be authentic no matter what I felt as I was doing it. Doing something without knowing if I believed it, knowing that the outcome wouldn't immediately [and might never] benefit me, taught me a lot about faith, but it taught me more about being useful. Continuously, I have to abdicate my notions of personal salvation and individual healing. Not just because that's fantasy, but because I know it's not about me [especially not about what I've earned or am entitled to]. 

When Charles Jackson revisited “The Lost Weekend”, years into his fickle sobriety, he "was most of all impressed by the sense that, despite the hero's utter self-absorption, it is a picture of a man groping for God, or at least trying to find out who he is." He understood the old patterns as driven by the same pangs of hunger: the thirst for alcohol as a longing for holiness/serenity, all this reaching as part of the same journey.
This diffusion between loss and abundance doesn’t mean sustained joy is impossible, or that all happiness is fleeting and inevitably contaminated. Instead, it reveals a more capacious vision of joy than we might have imagined—not "grace will deliver me from this suffering, or this mess", but "grace *is* this mess". Or at least, "grace is in the mess with me".

Throughout the pandemic, I have continually returned to the private journals and letters of my favorite authors. For a while, I hiked with Katherine Mansfield's notebooks as a form of presence. "Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life," she wrote in an entry. I still cry when I read the line. It reminds me of the dusty shoebox full of letters buried at the bottom of my closet, that are now 6ft further above ground than the woman who wrote them. That somehow, love continues to endure and redeem, and language continues to persist. And it's a remarkable, almost miraculous thing how it persists. It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing. The emails, texts, poems, and essays we write—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: "Dear friend, I write to you in your life from my life?"

I imagine each word as a piece of thread, stitching our worlds together. Long silver threads of text. Lines assisting rendering, dreaming minds not to see everything by itself and separate, but to see the seams often unseen in the dark expanse across space and time. This is, perhaps, a kind of sorcery. A power not to wield - but to hold. To practice holding. Every night, this is how we construct the ineffable other—bone by proverbial bone with what has been given to us. 

Dear friend, I am writing to you in your life from my life to build each other (up). So that you may endure in me, and I will abide in you. And it will not matter which of us survives the other. 

Here when I say, "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else, I am saying"I never want to be without you again."
And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet
in all of the lives we are,
it's with hands that are dying and resurrected.

When I don't touch you,
it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

I found myself returning to Lorri Gottlieb's "Maybe You Should Talk To Someone" earlier today, where she reminds us that an essential part of therapy is knowing the self that we are. Part of getting to know ourselves is unknowing ourselves. Specifically - we have to let go of the limiting stories we've told ourselves about who we are so they do not trap us. And can finally live our lives and not the same [sob] story we've been telling ourselves about our lives. 

Similar to [Joan] Didion's, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." I'm fascinated by the narratives that we tell ourselves and others and how those narratives are continually disrupted, sometimes wildly and painfully. 

One of the joys of getting older is we're able to laugh at how wrong we were, and perhaps even over our previous naivety. But many of us blur the line between discernment and becoming condescending [ego-driven] skeptics in that learning process. So while there's absolute truth in knowing that we tell overly simplistic stories, and it's important to interrogate those stories, it's crucial, vital even, to be wary of the dismissal and skepticism that comes with that interrogation. 

Being wary of both sides also speaks to the elegance of a higher level of conscience, which is how AA meetings work (or should if you've ever been to one that's a trauma competition). That collective (or group) conscience works by a room full of experts on their own experiences who are simultaneously learning that they aren't the exact experts they thought. Nobody has all the answers. So, instead, you come to a discussion meeting, for example, and you say, "I'm having this problem." Then 10-20 other people offer their iteration, experience, approach, and hope - and by the end of the meeting, the group conscience, or the chorus, becomes the expert.

I think that's part of the reparative work that is often first attempted with clichés or platitudes. And if you're able to get beyond telling that person to fuck-off, perhaps, even for the super self-conscious, hyper self-aware person, part of what the cliché can do is meddle and overturn our senses of expertise and dominion over our lives. Or suggest that a more straightforward explanation that feels incredibly trite of banal has something to teach us that we might not already understand.

One of the things I think is delightful about how expansive recovery has become (i.e., Glennon Doyle, Brene Brown, Leslie Jamison) is that I'm never quite sure what is an AA cliché or just a cliché. I will forever adore "sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem" because it is such a valuable antidote to my natural impulse to solve a problem by thinking about it hard enough or deconstructing it intellectually over and over. The notion that maybe the answer to my problem was getting coffee with a stranger, instead of analyzing a part of my life to a sickening or excessive degree, continues to be valid. Sometimes I need to get out of that self wrapped up in the cognitive distortions caused by shame and grief. 

I also like "feelings aren't facts" [now, I hated it until my 30's], even though I speak and write about them endlessly. I used to believe that there was truth in everything - I just needed to dig deep enough to find it. It's a dumb allegory, but I thought shame had roots that I needed to dig up and cut out, but shame isn't something that gets uprooted. It's feculent. It's the murky/diseased water that poisons the well. What it needs is exposure to the light. Then it can be drawn out. And that's something no one can do by themselves. It [literally] takes a village. 

[I'm almost done with the cliches now.] I know it's trite, but "one day at a time" remains essential because the number of times I've had to invoke it to help me through the moment is infinite. When I first got clean, I couldn't wrap my head around even the remote possibility that my life was just beginning. Until almost age 26, I connotated joy to the absence of pain because that was the limit of my experience. And since that was the limit of my experience, I had an incredibly limited (and stunted) imagination. And now, over a decade later of living into miracle after miracle - all I can say is, "thank goodness for how deluded I was." 

The beauty of recovery, especially the second step, is its power to restore us from a myriad of hopeless states. Initially, I needed to be restored from insanity, but now - now I can be restored from grief, shame, depression, and trauma. And through recovery and therapy, I can return to that proverbial wasteland of the past to find those rejected pieces of myself that were never really broken, just under-developed, or incorrectly utilized. And those outcast parts of ourselves, when utilized correctly, can become instrumental in connecting with others. To mirror Rilke: "The emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate in full resonance with your world. Use it for once." 

Or more simply - there is so much room for us to grow into, if only we could learn how to fill it. 

Recovery and therapy both fundamentally teach us what can be filled (and how). And anything that we cannot fill can be bridged. That's the whole point of meeting someone halfway. 

I tell you "it has been a long time"
How long
doesn’t really matter

I have come back
to sit on your kitchen counter 
holding that first light

I have come back
to touch the trees
in every graveyard

I have come back
to use your shower
and stand in this field at dusk

I have come back
to sing in the car 

to drink water
from your garden

I have come back
mostly to myself, but also to you

I have come back
to close that gate behind me

The Last Supper

Every time
it varies -

Still, I am
Laid out

a banquet
made wholly [and holy] 
for you

My heart,
a tender feast
served last

Yours 
thunders from
the back of the room. 
Mine
slams down 
against your plate 
Against this tall table

And the beat of your tongue 
punching your teeth 
mixes to the tang of your thighs
stuck to the velvet seat
of your high-backed chair
[fills the room with music]

I tell you, "this is my body"
Devour me 
because I believe
in transubstantiation,

Someday
I will wake in your veins
And run
right through the core of you.

I didn't want to give up on bearing witness because it was too hard. It felt vital to bear witness. I had to name it. I had to pay attention to it, but I also got caught up in spending so much attention that my grief became a permanent mailing address for years. Consequently, I hope there's a bit of forgiveness in that. There's a powerful, yet false empathetic pull, where some part of us wants to believe we can redeem that wallowed time by taking on someone else's suffering for or with them.

But, of course, anyone who's dealt with sustained grief or lived through a period of prolonged suffering knows that's not what that suffering person wants you to do. It doesn't honor their loss or experience. It doesn't do anyone justice. So the actual processes of praising, noticing, attending to the good things and the functions of loving, and holding on to the world's music are as essential as witnessing and naming and holding the tremendous sorrow that comes with being alive. Grief, trauma, and loss will always crack our hearts - open or closed. And open, the good news about open is you turn around, and there are, of course, billions of other people who live on this earth who have lost a person they love so much. And there they all are. And it's so great to be in their company.

I came to see that until I was willing to shed that rusted armor of grief, shame, and horror that I actually couldn't experience the world. And for me, radical acceptance and surrender [to unknown and untold possibilities] can profoundly change our conceptions of what healing looks like, and that's the moment that we can move from grief into the transformative power of mourning in the context of having a future.

Love persists and redeems through all of that. And it's a remarkable, almost miraculous thing how it persists.

Every story about illumination begins in the dark

⁣⁣⁣I’m hitting suicides down my driveway at 10 pm, and I cannot count how many times I have said that I love running in the rain when I have only ever wanted to be a person who loves running in the rain. ⁣

⁣⁣There’s a coyote at the edge of my garden, I press my flashlight into my hand and wait to see if he howls. I’ll have 90 seconds to make it inside. ⁣

⁣⁣⁣My palms are glowing - my trachea is the size of May. Lungs wider than March. ⁣

⁣⁣⁣180lbs of aether lit like the heart of the night. ⁣

⁣⁣⁣If I am the alchemist⁣
⁣of my grief⁣
⁣I will cast a light⁣ 
I cannot hide ⁣
in its place.

I’m fine with writing bad poetry in the notes app at 2 am if it helps you survive

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣it is the start of another summer
where I haven’t made my bed⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣for days
only allowing my body to hang halfway out in a tangle like ⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣kudzu climbing up the side of a crumbling wall⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣reaching for something impossible.⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣love, I promise there haven’t always been ⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣dishes spilling out of the sink⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣& the laundry piled in the corner is clean ⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣I’ll get to it tomorrow⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣There are nights when I wish we were still young, but then ⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣I know we still are or at least there is no other way to explain ⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣How we made every elevator our own⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣How my eyeshadow blended into your collarbone⁣⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣⁣The way we bury ourselves
into anything that moves 

most nights ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣I scream
into the abyss like a siren 
Weep on the bathroom floor,
and I never mention it⁣⁣⁣⁣ in the morning⁣

⁣God, I pray
I am starting⁣ to ⁣⁣⁣⁣grow wings
in the absence of everything.⁣⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣There are ten ways to say sunset.⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣There are 100 ways to say “I love you” without the language of loss. ⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣How are you? ⁣⁣What parts of you grow in the dark?⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣Do you still run with the wolves?⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣⁣I am still⁣⁣ ⁣⁣made of starlight

trial by fire

I’ve permanently set my phone to “do not disturb” ⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣by which I mean
I will not tell another person I am sorry for their grief
when I cannot hold [it with] them. ⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣Look - one day I will bring you all the strength that we left in the mountains ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
Until then, we can only offer up⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣some holy unwanted mess of ourselves ⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣and hope it is still a gift. ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣I too have clung tightly to the soleness of a burden; ⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣in an effort to make it pure. ⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣⁣and somehow, ⁣⁣⁣
burning my hands has always kept me from praying.

mysterium tremendum

What my mother says about God
I believe about loneliness

That something that goes on forever can still be good

When you flipped the tables in the temple
I should have burned the veil that was torn

Every saint has ended up bloody
trying to scrub the grace from my wrists
the hallowed from your mouth

I dream of a tender worth being holy for

My orthopedist tells me to stop running during thunderstorms
Me, the patron saint of lightning bolts
Electrocuted twice. The heart still murmurs.

Good god, I’ve been grounding out.
Have I ever been struck; Truly?
Everything runs through me at high voltage.

The memory of you -
so strong that I have to close my eyes and
swallow just to get it down
like 200 fireflies in my stomach.

There is music playing loudly in the back of my mind
Everything in me is chanting your name
as I crush a water bottle left out in the sun - all at once.

It’s rushing down my throat hot and quick,
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand,
Skin glistening like something celestial has been kissing me
like I’ve been loved by grace for the last 47 minutes.

I push myself so hard that I lose my dinner in a stranger’s backyard
When you get here; kiss me like you’ve been starving
My legs are quaking,
My shoulder blades gleaming alabaster

I blaze with so much silver
Even the stars bend around my hips.

In a dream, I wake up on the shore in West Vancouver

I meet your parents at Lighthouse Park, even though they’re divorced and I only met your dad twice. There is nothing but September fog to cover our grief, and your niece laughs just like you, at the seaweed stuck to the small of my back. I want to eat that laugh, I want to rub it on my chest like lavender. I want to make a sound tattoo of the last voicemail you left me; when you said you loved me beyond the end of everything. I want God to reach down, snap this building from the ground and shake it like a cocktail mixer. As if that re-collision of DNA would give any of us our old lives back.

divination ritual

when the loss makes you / 
                 more ghost 
than whatever you were before

When the only heritage that’s left 
is tending a garden with your remains

/

I walk down my hallway backwards
turn off all the lights in my bathroom 
scream your name three times in the mirror 

I cannot 
        / see you from here

An Ode to Rilke’s “Ahead of All Parting”

I don’t know when it begins, 
the willingness to be 
in this moment 
to moment, 
to hold on to you by saying I don’t
mind too much 
when the trees are stripped of their color, 
I choose this icy rain at my feet. 
I choose this friend to love,
a trembling hand to clasp in my own, 
and the sweat that trickles down your back 
on an evening in July

Abandon everything else. Or cancel the cost.
I want to touch something
so whole 
it annihilates what’s 
missing.