On standing in the muck and the mire
a short note about belief as a discipline
Every Job Has a First Day
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.
You have to believe it. You don’t mean any harm.
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.