“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anaïs Nin
Hello loves
As the saying goes, “April showers bring May flowers.”
May is indeed a time for blooming. The birds are getting louder, the bees are fat and fuzzy and buzzing about.
A week or so ago I took a long walk in Roosevelt Island, President Teddy’s nature reserve in the middle of the Potomac river. I took long walks through the damp muddy trails all fall and winter, the scene most quietly, the leaves mostly brown. But now that spring has arrived, it looks like a completely different place. I lost track of where I was on the same 4 mile loop I’ve walked dozens of times. The grass is tall, thick, and green. The trail is interrupted by brimming trees; I gently pushed aside cascades of bright leaves to weave my way through.
I took along my 2010 Nikon D3 camera, which I am finally teaching myself how to use properly. I’m messing with the manual setting, and while the photos are imperfect, the process of discovery, of noticing the tiniest creatures and buds and leaves, was the greatest delight.
Even when I’m tired and in pain and losing hope, all I need to do is get outside.
On Love & Growth
May crept up on me. I’m writing the first draft of this love letter I’ve cobbled together with any sense of cohesion on Friday, April 30. I have nothing and everything to say. I thought of making this month’s content a photo essay of tiny plants, but then that’s a cop out. Thank you for your grace and your time.
I was just getting used to April, getting used to the weather’s and friend’s invitations to make my way back out into the world. I was fortunate to receive the J&J vaccine last month, and am already swept into the rushing river of activity.
All around us seasonal plants are waking up. They reserved their resources all winter, shutting down growth activities that demand energy. So now months later, growth looks like the easiest thing in the world, and the most colorful too. The question is not whether or not to reemerge, but how.
As much as I try to mimic this natural, sustainable cycle, the demands of being human too often supersede these needs. Trees do not have to maintain a job for wages and health insurance. Trees do not have kitchens to clean, family to worry about, texts to respond to. For us, winter was still exhausting and stressful. I’m not ready to bloom.
Instead, I find myself feeling like a stunned bunny. With so many options, invitations, impulses, I sit wide-eyed and overwhelmed. I want to run and frolic maskless outside, but cower in my apartment at the thought. I’m desperately excited to safely hug loved ones and partake in long overdo celebrations; and yet, I’m so tired. I frantically plan all the ways I’m going to change my life, and then watch them disintegrate into fatigued illusions. And thanks to science, I can feel normal. A new academic term has emerged describing our collective state: languishing.
Languishing isn’t burnout, which is more a lack of energy. It’s not depression, with its lack of hope. Instead, it’s a sense of stagnation, of emptiness, of just-getting-by, a malaise that might be the dominant emotion of 2021.
I understand it in my life as a extended state of conflict - an internal battle between now and not yet as we face our stymied ability to take any concrete action in our lives. The waiting game is even weirder as we glimpse the final stretch, the door out of this prison. Fellow Substack writer Caroline McCarthy articulated the feeling well in her latest essay, “Lotus-Eaters”:
I’ve felt creatively sapped…I just got exhausted and numb….I have had a lot of anxiety lately that I couldn’t quite articulate, and I think it comes from the fact that the end of the “COVID era” is near and now I find myself subconsciously asking the question, “Will this go away?” Will I suddenly start feeling a new sense of aliveness and enthrallment the first time I’m able to go to a loud, sweaty dance party under the stars — and what happens if I don’t? What happens if the things we’re supposed to be missing so dearly right now end up leaving us no less empty and unfulfilled when we can experience them again? What if we’re still broken? What if there wasn’t anything real to “heal” to? Where is our place in humanity? Where is our place in something bigger than humanity?
Oof. Intense.
And the worst part is that I don’t have the energy to address any of it. Despite our collective desperation, business (at least in my workplace) is not only as usual, but feels quickened, a doubling down on the toxic hustle mentality that is crushing our souls and our resources.
And this matters.
Caroline deftly notes:
This more insidious part of the city’s culture is that when everyone of a certain income level — the ones who should be able to effect change in local politics and other civic affairs — is so wildly overscheduled and exhausted and tend to turn to self-destructiveness, they either voluntarily or accidentally miss out on countless ways to be part of their communities.
(Raises hand).
Painful. Hard truths always are. I can barely get my arms around all the hard truths I’ve learned about myself and this world. Learned is even too ambitious a word - more like glimpsed through frosted glass blocks like the ones in the shower I grew up using, 10 inches thick and warping.
Truth engenders growth. And growing is a messy, obtuse process with no guaranteed end result. And like growth, or perhaps synonymously, love is brutally difficult. Both pummel you over and over, ask more of you than you think you can give. Both always sought after, yet both often a surprise, like we never quite believe we’ll get what we hope for.
With great hope and an abyss of unknowns, I cling to writing these non-answers.
One thing I do know: I’m still afraid.
And when I’m afraid, I turn to language. Language, poetry especially, helps us feel less alone. Reminds us that we are but single grains of sand in infinite worlds of beaches. It gives us a chance to peer into someone else’s consciousness, to see someone else as wholly human, to meld our brains with another through time and space. To get out of our own self-centered way and get more curious about what’s going on around us. To learn something true.
As re-opening compounds already complex and fractured social dynamics, as some countries race towards herd immunity and others desperately struggle, this section of “Dogfish” by Mary Oliver reminds me that each of us everywhere are the same in our evolutionary fight to simply survive.
So may we be kind, for whatever reason.
May we have the courage to accept uncertainty with grace.
May we grow seeds of compassion in our hearts, especially for those we’ve been conditioned to ignore, reject, hate (including and especially ourselves).
May we understand the true meaning of the freedom that this reemergence may offer us.
In the words of Newton Smith from his poem “Threshold”,
Here is the freedom that always frightened you.
You have forgotten your name
and it does not matter.
Practice
Need movement? Relieve some physical stagnation with this Morning Neck Stretch (now in our library, along with guided meditations).
Into journaling? Free write to the prompts below:
What big lessons have I learned during COVID?
In what small ways can I live those lessons moving forward?
Want to meditate? Pick a poem or a few lines of one you love and memorize it. Hold it in your heart and whisper it to yourself often.
None of these work for you? Please let me know what will! Simply reply to this email - I’m right on the other side.
Loving Lately
Reading:
New York Times pieces on how the pandemic is affecting women in particular, like Zoom burnout being worse for women, the challenges female scientists face, and our societal betrayal of working moms
Kim Addonizio’s memoir “Bukowski in a Sundress”, comprised of delightfully whip-smart, self-deprecating, beautifully honest essays. A favorite passage from one:
Once you were a child who knew her place in the world…You had un-dreamed of wealth, though at the time it seemed but a handful of coins. Then you were exiled from that world forever. There is no going back. Not even a river of pure alcohol could take you there; not even writing can ferry you across. The river keeps carrying things away, and you remain planted beside it like a cottonwood, or a willow. This is where you belong now. Pay attention. Listen to what is passing. — from “How to Try to Stop Drinking So Much”
Watching:
“Minari”, a deeply gentle and magnificently subtle film about home, faith, and family. It engenders empathy for each character, who are brilliantly cast and played. Youn Yuh-jung, who plays the grandmother, won the Oscar for best supporting actress, the first Korean to do so. Her relationship with David, the son, is my favorite character in the film. A close second is the father, Jacob’s, farm helper Paul, a steady, spiritual friend and social pariah. There is a scene when they drive by him on their way home from church, and he’s soaking his cutoff maroon shirt with sweat, slowly dragging a crucifying-sized wooden cross down the empty road. When the family asks what he’s doing, he says “It’s Sunday. This is my church.”
Chloé Zhao’s acceptance speech, who is the first woman of color, first Chinese woman, and only second female in 93 years of Oscars to win Best Director! I highly recommend listening to her short, graceful speech exalting humanity’s inherent goodness in full, but here’s a snippet:
Even when it may seem like the opposite is true, I have always found goodness in the people I met everywhere I went in the world.
So this is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves. And to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. And this is for you, you inspire me to keep going.
And we keep going, even through fire.
I send you love and strength dears.
Take good care.
Yours and messy as ever,
Colby