I am 38 today and I am finally doing grown-up things. At least if you take those things out of context. Lately, I’ve been isolating my experiences and trying to explain them to my 10-year-old self, my 15-year-old-self, my 20-year-old self. I’d like to believe that my 30-year-old self could see her life coming, but I’m not sure she did, either.
It’s goes like this. I look at 20-year-old me and I say–
“In a little under 18 years, you will be attending a dinner party on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, catered, in a Pre- War apartment with a grand piano. There will be people from France, South Africa, Poland, and the United States there. You will be performing a song– not your own– but of a dear friend from England, a musician friend, whose birthday it is. You will wear a bright green dress that you found in a thrift store that makes you feel a little like April O’Neill from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with all of its buckles and zippers, and you’ll be attending and performing with the love of your life.”
This description gives me a buzz in the back of my head. Details fine enough that it must be believed. But the rest, out of context, makes my 20-year-old self utterly baffled. What did my life become? Am I famous? Do I live in NYC? Am I rich? Conventionally, what I believed it would take to have this scenario play out would require circumstances, money, compromise that my younger self would not and could not fathom. So then I lay it on her, dramatically, with a wink–
“And you are and have always been completely yourself.”
She almost never believes me. She rolls her eyes and conjures some back alley deals or crossroads selling of soul in her imagination.
I try another. I turn to my 10 year old self and say–
“In 28 years, you will wake up on your 38th birthday in a tent-like dome with a fluffy king sized bed covered in beautiful linens that overlooks the hundreds-of-years-old Redwoods in the mountains of California. You will be drinking coffee– black– that you picked up the week before in Reno, Nevada that the love of your life prepared and delivered to you in bed, as he does almost every morning. You’ll be eating a cinnamon roll half the size of your head, and preparing to go see the ocean that day. You will have as many mixed and big feelings as you do right now, but you will have a way to work them into good. California is not your home, but you have a home, on the other side of the country. You only see it sometimes because most of your time is spent traveling. You have a perfect big dog who is always with you. You sing. For a living. Your write and you sing and you meet people and that weird 3rd grade career day report that you turned in where you said you wanted to be Shania Twain when you grew up and had to redo because it was impractical so you said you’d be a veterinarian instead– you were right the first time. Well, kind of.”
She believes me. But out of context, she has a few more questions. So I tell her–
“And you are still exactly who you are.”
At this, she does not believe me anymore.
I try once more. To my 5-year-old self I say–
“In 33 years, you will wake up at last and know you are loved.”
She looks so relieved.
“It’ll only take 33 years?” she asks.
“Yes,” I will say.
“What do I have to do?” she says.
“Be yourself,” I say. “It’s already there inside of you.”
She accepts this. She believes me. She’s always believed in me.
We are back on the road because nothing lasts forever. Not our time at home. Not our dwindling bank account. Not our hibernation period. We left a week ago, the road before us our most ambitious yet– to get from Saratoga Springs, NY to Chico, CA in one week, in one piece, and be ready to start a four month tour upon landing. The days were a blur, but here I am, sitting in a public library in Chico, body and soul together, preparing to play a show in a couple of hours. Preparing for the inevitable feeling of the road, that every moment is fleeting, that nothing lasts, that being in the moment is the only moment or I’ll miss it.
Our first night on the cross country trek, we stopped for Mexican food and a sleep at our friend Ann’s house. Her Someone, Tom, passed last July. Tom, who was also someone to me, who leaves a cavernous space in his wake. It’s a space as big as he was– tall and able and equal parts intimidating and softy. No, I take that back. He was much more the latter. While I’ve been grieving his absence from my own home, stepping into his home– now only Ann’s– rippled my insides with a new strangeness. The grief, yes. But also, the inexplicable feeling of having forgotten to put something on my to do list. Every moment in the space gives me the chronic time loop of remembering he is not there. The feeling of missing something, then wondering what it is, then remembering he is gone, then pushing it from my mind, then feeling something missing… It’s a very small dose of what Ann must go through, daily confronted with his clothes, his coffee mugs, his car in the garage.
So, she is in the process of clearing out his things. This works differently for different people, as I understand it. Some rid themselves immediately of their loved one’s things. Others go years before– or never– parting with the pieces and remnants of a life left behind.
There isn’t a right way, but Ann is intent to land somewhere in the middle. She’s agreeing to be in grief, but also making pacts that she will not hold on to everything forever. Except when she opens her cabinets in the kitchen and wonders how she could possibly part with the pasta bowls. Because the pasta bowls, while they are relatively useless and one of them is decidedly cracked, are part of Tommy Tuesday– the day of the week in which Tom would cook dinner when Ann had to work late. Never one to do something halfway, he’d decided that for an evening of pasta, he and Ann must eat out of proper dishware. It isn’t just the memory of Tommy Tuesdays Ann would be throwing away. It’s the memory of Tom able to cook, able to move– just before Tom was too sick to do anything at all. Keeping the pasta bowls isn’t going to bring Tom back. But maybe throwing them away is to throw away what came before. Maybe throwing them away takes away everything but the brutal days that came after the pasta bowls.
Ann knows all of this. She has self awareness for days. She can conjugate her feelings with incredible accuracy, arriving at the proper “I should” solution to her grief. She knows that throwing out the bowls she’s never going to use isn’t going to throw away Tom or her memories or a life spent working on love. In very present time, she is doing the practical work for her mother, clearing out her father’s things as they move her mom in a downsizing effort. She grows frustrated with the old greeting cards, the receipts, the tchotchkes, the midway projects. It’s a clear path from a life shared to a clean slate she can see for her mother.
And yet.
The pasta bowls remain in Ann’s cupboard, too. Chipped. Empty. Metaphorical. Infuriatingly metaphorical.
I can see a clear path for Ann, too. Of course I can. It is not my house. Everyone else’s problems are always much simpler to solve than my own. My Someone attempts it, too.
“I know some people take a photo of the things that they want to remember and then get rid of them,” he tells Ann as we stare at the open cupboard.
“I know, I know,” she says. She’s already considered it. We all always already know the answer.
And yet.
I remember the strange things I took from my Aunt Tammy’s home a couple of years ago after her passing– a yellow silk scarf, a purse, a wooden yoga dog statue, sweaters, Moon Tarot cards, a kitchen bowl. I’ve since repurposed my grief, in small pieces, back out to local thrift stores. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the recollection of why I took these things to begin with. It’s a too-ready impulse to cling to what is left, to draw to us a smell or something tactile in hopes of rustling up a memory close enough to the person themselves that may just conjure them. And in this futile conjuring, it may even briefly alleviate the unending loop of losing them again and again as the minutes drag further from their departure of your timeline. A pasta bowl is a short respite from the aftermath of anger, despair, heartbreak, sadness– and simultaneously the reminder of these same emotions.
We preserve our people through their things, creating museums in our homes. Eventually, if we do not continue to live through these things back into our home again– if we do not repurpose them or lighten our load, the museum takes over, and we find ourselves moving around these items carefully. They become relics. The space becomes cavernous, cold, preciously preserved. Perfectly unlived at the exact moment our loved ones stopped living.
Ann is not there. This is a fresh wound. But she wants to ensure that she doesn’t get there, seeing a fork of a potential future in her mother’s home. She’s taking one room a month. She started with the laundry room. Then the hall closet. It’s almost the end of March. The kitchen cupboards open. Then close again. The pasta bowls remain.
To know we are not meant to carry it all, that we are not meant to keep anything forever, one must only look to the things we are trying desperately to save. I was at a birthday party last month on the Upper West Side in a prewar apartment when a couple, one half originally from France, began talking about the impressive petroglyphs found in some caves in the south of France.
“And you can really see them?” someone interjected.
“Well, they are facsimiles,” the woman replied, “The air everyone was breathing on the originals was ruining them.”
Everyone carried on, listening, then switched topics. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. When we returned home the following evening, I stayed up in bed looking for the facsimile caves on my phone. Sure enough, I found that if one would go to these caves, you would not in fact enter into the original caves, but an exact replica kilometers above them. And they were, in fact, constructed not because of graffiti or theft, but because the CO2 from human breath was wearing away the ancient drawings. The cave was shut down some time in the early 90’s, and we’ve been accepting the facsimiles as the real thing ever since, in some kind of theatrical suspension of disbelief agreement for the sake of preservation. The reconstructed experience is near perfectly replicated in structure, light, temperature, and even humidity.
This means that our very breath, the thing that is keeping us alive, is the same thing that is killing our connection to our ancestors, our history, our tactile memories. By simply living, we are tearing down where we have been, eating the breadcrumbs of our existence.
So, we took a picture, and placed it on top.
For the love of everything, what is it for? If we cannot look at it anymore, if we seal it all away, who are we saving it for? Will the next generation build a cavern on top of the cavern on top of the ancient cavern to show the progress, to memorialize us? Will they care? Or will they put it all in a box with the pasta bowls and be done with it?
We cannot save anything, let alone everything. If we are to live our own lives fully, to the end, it is impossible.
And yet.
I believe I’d like to see those facsimiles someday. They sound a little like the incarnation of starting again.
And maybe it looks like this– that these memorials we host around us also exist within us. I have at least three pasta bowls of hurt stored within me. Last year, I declared that I would forgive my father. I do not know what that means, but the work seemed to start with saying it aloud. I open the cupboard, I look at the pasta bowl, I close the cupboard. I haven’t been ready. Sometimes I move it to a different shelf and move it back again. I try adding more pasta bowls. I try ignoring them. I try justifying their presence– I have a right to this story. I have a right to keep these memories: as fuel, as identity, as a link to what was true.
And yet.
Nothing can last forever. Even God’s anger, I’ve read, has a limit. Probably mine does, too.
If I keep my anger, if I choose not to forgive, I will have to work around these pasta bowls forever. I will have to build new shelves instead of clearing the space that I have. I may even have to close up a whole room within me and build a new one on top. It’s an incredible amount of emotional labor to memorialize pain, and seems only to create more heartache. I know, practically, that by releasing these pasta bowls that I will not change history, I will not change the truth of my story, I will not change my identity– and that forgiveness will provide its own fuel. I am beginning to see the clear path.
I am contorting less around them. I have maybe even placed them into a box. I’m feeling better, and it is not contingent on writing a letter to my father or demanding an apology. It has never done any good before– he has never returned with the answers I need, or answered at all. I could just as soon speak to his gravestone one day and reap the same response. Whether or not I keep my pasta bowls means nothing to the dead, or in this case the living dead.
It is solely my shelf space, my cavern. I think I may continue to breathe– deep breaths. I suspect that between breathing and living my life fully, intentionally, those old stories will fade from the walls. The walls within me will remain. I wonder what I’ll do with all of that luxurious space.
We lost a lot of trees while we were gone. Not small ones. The storms that blew through New England while we were down south, soaking up the sun on tour, wrecked our yard. We were fortunate– they didn’t land on the house, the shed, my studio. But it was no small destruction. A huge one went down, taking a few smaller ones with it. The trees that remain around the fallen are still bent at an angle from which I’m not sure they’ll ever recover.
I have not yet spent enough time in my home or on this land to be able to distinguish if they were at all useful or important to our two-and-a-quarter acre ecosystem. I couldn’t even tell you their specific classification. Mostly, we lost pines. We’ve been told that’s common here– pines don’t have tap roots. They’re real pushovers. Oaks, I am told, maples– the big deciduous types not only have a taproot, but are a flat replica of themselves below ground. They spread wide like the base of a wineglass, their roots luxurious in space, deepening further with their extended tap root finger marking their spot. Which is why they are more likely to survive the heavy winds of a New England storm.
The big tree that fell was this kind. A maple.
It created a small mountain of limb and trunk and branch, at which we numbly stared from our bedroom window. The immensity of this aftermath was trumped only by the loss of our lone and favorite Blue Spruce that went down next to the driveway– a household favorite– ball and all headlong upon our entry.
Trees have always been an obvious metaphor for me. As a kid, my parents called me a Treehugger, a gentle nag at my penchant for spending long mornings and afternoons in the woods around our cabin, coming back with a list of animals I’d seen, plants I’d identified, and rocks I thought pretty enough to bring home so that they lined the windowsills. I was the one who stayed indoors during deer season, gluing together pompoms and pipe cleaners and smearing them with paint rather than smearing my hands with the blood of the deer the rest of the family hunted– the deer that would feed us the rest of the winter. The venison I had no stomach for as I got closer to adulthood, as grateful as I was to their sacrifice.
“Our little Treehugger,” my dad would say as he came back in for lunch to find me melting wax onto a finished art project. It didn’t bother me, as I knew I didn’t actually hug trees… very often. It was a shorthand for some sort of understanding about who I am. A way of distinguishing some core belief I contained that was apparent to everyone, that didn’t seem to conflict with what I believed about myself enough to protest. And from there, I grew into a folk singer– treehugger adjacent, if not synonymous. In a sorting and forgiving of my childhood story’s hurt, I now have a maple tree– the maple from the backyard of my childhood home– tattooed up my arm and on to my right shoulder blade coming just short of my spine. A tree, at last, to hug me back.
And then I have my Circle of Trees.
Annie reentered my life in 2020, after a long hiatus of growing apart and moving on. We did long distance yoga and book club and grew to touch base almost every day. A happenstance of the pandemic, and of lowering our defenses. We had a third, too, but she fell away like a pine. Annie and I persisted, and came across a book that would help define us– The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s a book of faith, and a book of losing faith, and a book that took two women who invited a third– not long after a fourth– and grounded us firmly in each other’s path. The passage that has become our own shorthand is that of the Circle of Trees, wherein Kidd describes her women folk as a circle in the forest, in which each of them are a tree. They are rooted in each other’s soil, growing separately but sharing sun and shade and nutrients– sharing the earth beneath them as a way of communicating and connecting. It’s a metaphor that makes these hapless sensitive spirits feel stronger, less alone, and shielded from even the strongest New England storm.
The pine who blew down, she eventually grew back. Tentatively at first, then extraordinarily fast. For a minute, I mistook her for a maple. An oak. An ash or a birch or even a cottonwood. But a pine, however beloved, is still a pine. And at the end of last year, a wind took her out again from our circle. Not even a strong one. Just a low breeze on an ordinary day. And like that, she was laid out, rocks falling from the ball of her roots, though still casting those rocks in our direction.
“We are one tree less,” Annie has been saying since. The ache of it radiates from the truth, and I have still not fully healed from the loss. It is one thing to have a tree blown away. It is another for her to pick up her roots and leave. The unnaturalness of this departure crowds out my acceptance.
So when we came home last week to find our trees down, I was submissive to the metaphor again. I strained my eyes against the barrenness of the large tree’s absence, and covered my head with my blanket at 7:20 in the morning, when the sun peers in through a window that this tree used to block from glaring directly on my head. I begrudge her more. And then, I decided she was not a pine at all, not helpless and unsure and unable to resist. She really was a maple. Only a hardwood could do this much damage– and take so many down with her– when she uprooted and decided to fall. This was not the result of a light wind, but an accumulation of storms over time. One tree less, maybe, but a Circle of Trees affected. She’d been releasing her roots before someone else ever came to push her out.
There is a myth about hardwoods, that their root system below is actually a mirror image of themselves– that they go as deep as they do tall, each branch above replicated by one below. This is not true. In fact, it is near impossible for a tree to do so, to dig so deep, and still receive the nutrients it needs to survive. It must grow outward at the base. We are never exactly who we are above as we are deep within, no matter how hard we try. Always, we must spread our roots out toward others to steady ourselves. I am no exception. I can only hope my taproot is not formed of anger, but of something more sustainable. I can only hope I keep reaching out.
I have been finding small miracles beneath the wreckage. We have made friends with our neighbor, now– a handyman we were certain hated us, but turned out only not to know us at all. He came with machinery to clear out the large slabs that would’ve taken us a couple weeks to clear ourselves– slabs he’ll mill and use for his own work. He left us neat piles about the property– fodder for a bonfire we intend to invite our friends to this month before we leave again for our next tour. And also this: in late fall, we planted a northern tart cherry tree. It sits in the back yard, and was fully forgotten in the felled tree derelict. My Someone came in after the first assessment, looking hopeful.
“Everything is okay?” I asked.
“Well, no– we still lost a lot of trees, but guess what?” he paused for an answer, and on receiving none, continued, “I lifted up some of the limbs and found our cherry tree.”
I sagged, feeling myself drowned beneath a heap of limbs.
“No,” he said, reading me, “it’s okay! I think it’s going to be just fine! I straightened it up, and it looks to be in good shape.”
What luck. What damn dumb luck. Of all the pines, the big maple, the creature casualties– the littlest, not yet one year with us, held on for hopes of spring.
Sometimes the trees that have grown so big and strong around us, while destructive in their exit, aren’t as meaningful as the ones we are planting right now, the ones we are tending to. These little ones that may even one day bear fruit. Literal fruit. Sometimes, when those big maples fall, you’ll still notice the big gap like a toothy leer, but then you’ll suddenly remember what’s important, and with a quick assessment, can save what’s beneath it. And the sturdiness of a cherry tree in its first winter will shock you back into doing the good work of putting your hands to the soil– continuing to reach out. Of unexpected new neighbors. Of the reassurance of old friends.
Sometimes one less tree means a little more light for the rest of it. Some of it blinding in the morning, willing you to get up and see how it also shines directly down on a winter day to a strapping young cherry tree, waiting to be born.
I love New Year’s Day like I love the feel of a house thoroughly cleaned. I’m willingly deceived into treating the day as laundered time. I suspend my disbelief at midnight New Year’s Eve and hold it til midnight the first.
Like most things, I blame my Christian upbringing. A Regenerational Baptism believer, at that– wherein there is magic in the water of baptism: it is mystically unified with time, space, and a little of the hard stuff (a god’s blood) to create salvation. They won’t call it magic, though– too Hollywood. Colloquially, it was once described to me in a Western PA preacher’s office, where I was once again relegated after asking too many questions in Sunday school, that if Christ’s blood was the cement, the baptism was the water, and together they made concrete salvation. That is a solid metaphor, void of magic.
That is, of course, unless you really messed up. The details aren’t totally clear, but at some point, there is a knowing that your salvation sort of slipped out the back, likely due to personal lack of diligence. Sometimes others can pick up on it before you do, and will likely take precious time to let you know you’re in dangerous territory of wringing out the magic waters from your soul and drying out in Hell. Once that happens, the process has to start all over again. My sister, the one who hasn’t spoken a kind word to me in a couple of decades, had to be baptized twice. Once in our swimming pool with a gaggle of other girls, and another time on a mission trip in Mexico. This makes sense to me. If anyone needs a couple of takes, it’d be this lady. Though I’m still wondering if there was some sort of chemical imbalance or parasite in her particular baptismals.
After my sister got her booster baptism, I became obsessed with the idea. Especially after my own baptism proved a little underwhelming. While it is, in addition to magic, also an outward sign of an inward agreement with God, I thought that it’d be… more. I thought I’d be more. I had impostor’s syndrome, and a distinct fear that everyone could see my tiny 12 year old breasts as I came up from the water in my wet white robe. Once I changed into more modest attire and retreated to the church basement, watching my parents be congratulated and all of the dyed perms mill around doling out cake (in hindsight there was cake– it was my spiritual birthday, after all), I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to try again. Maybe it wasn’t complete. Maybe there was a little spot behind my ears that was missed, and now I was destined to be only partially baptized in a full-immersion-only society. Again, again, again, I rotated through my skull. Every screw up, every impure thought (mind that I was twelve and that was just the beginning of those endless failures), every misstep had me running back to the anticlimactic day of my baptism. Maybe it was time for a refresh. A second dose. I needed another hit of purity.
When I broached the subject with my parents a couple of years later, they brushed me off. I asserted myself, pointing to my sister’s redo as evidence of our genetic disposition to faulty first baptisms. That in the time it took me to get one, she already got two, and doesn’t she always get everything? I was met only with their assurances, a kindness I couldn’t recognize at the time. I spent years emotionally self flagellating to compensate for my inability to receive the quick magic cleanliness my baptism clearly hadn’t delivered. I looked elsewhere, tampered with off limits theologies, and eventually left the faith. Or, left any remnant of it that is certified with a collar or a board of elders.
The impulse to start over still remains.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that offers a clean slate buy-in. This service, while a little morally pricey, is in supply because there is demand. Humans want this– the chance to start over. We get a new job, we move to a different town, we go on vacation, we even procreate extra humans for a chance to start new now. This time around. We’ll be better than we were, better than our parents ever could be. Eat, pray, love. Diet, repent, withhold. There are a thousand different ways to enact what we crave. Baptism is just a direct shot.
And so is New Year’s Day.
What is built into these rituals, falsely, is that we can step outside of our old skin and into a new body and spirit of good intentions and bright future. That this arbitrary day or pool of water or new town will fortify our will to that of a glowing orb spirit that isn’t messy with jealousy or skin or a full bladder. We will mind over matter the shit out of ourselves this time. And if we mess up– well, first is the self hatred. Then comes a new year. Or if your parents let you, a second baptism. But you gotta be damn lucky for the latter.
I’ve recently tried to stymie up the impulse. In my untangling of the more emotionally and mentally problematic parts of my religious upbringing, I veered the way of self sabotage, spending New Year’s Eves drinking too much of whatever was being served up, and spending the first day of the year grieving and repenting with a bowl of black eyed peas and greens and Ibuprofen. I would drink less. I would exercise more. I would be smarter, somehow, and iron my will until I was unstoppable and simultaneously the most lovable person anyone has ever encountered. Plus a three page list of goals for the year: how I would eat, what I would make, the money I would save, the dreams I would definitely accomplish, and how I would probably memorize all of the countries and be able to locate them on a map. Just for starters. The pull and push of mess-up-big then double-down-on-plans-to-be-better wasn’t all that different than the sin-and-repent cycle I knew all of my life.
My path isn’t for everyone. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even for me. But my need to start new, to be a better version of myself, it had me caught in an endless cycle of feeling my failures. Failure, it turns out, is not a great motivator. Especially when I was the one defining what constituted failure. If left up to me, I’m always failing. I’m never enough. I can’t even get my sins washed away right. In the last couple of years, I quit drinking. I exercise regularly. I write more. I take breathing more seriously. I take time less seriously. This isn’t a list of accomplishments, or a how-to. It has been a natural progression of getting to the bottom of the chronic problem of restarting. It’s not that I am messing up less; it’s that I stop categorizing time in terms of good or bad. It’s a long shot, but I’m trying. The extra walks help. So does the Tao.
But New Year’s Day is still irresistible to me. And why not? Fresh starts aren’t inherently bad. Using fresh starts to justify my mistakes or to set myself up for more self hatred– that is a problem. I’m trying to cultivate a healthier hangover. Instead of fogging over the source of my restart impulse, it’s more like a light of clarity searing over the truth of time as it is, not time as I wish it to be. The year behind me fresh in mind with mistakes, the year in front fresh with possibility. January 1st is a lovely cliff of intention I can feign to look over for miles forward and backward.
And so this year, for the second year, I invited my friends over for The Burning of Regrets. It’s a mid afternoon gathering, to account for the nonjudgmental potential of real hangovers and lack of sleep. And it gives me the morning to brood and wander through the suspension of time while I tidy my home and add more salt to the black-eyed peas. The smell of brown rice fills the kitchen, mixing with the cinnamon and vanilla sweet of the Golden Milk I began simmering before noon. Expectations for the 1st are much lower than the Eve before, so my perfectionist host self takes a nap while I take a few minutes to sit and write a little speech. It feels silly, but necessary, on account of the resistance that will inevitably arise.
Our friends arrive in the stagger that suits them best, some with cheeks still red from their New Year’s Day hikes, others a little sleepy eyed from a late night or a long end of year. We fill our bowls with Hoppin’ Johns and our glasses with bubbly or fake beers or sparkling water to our taste. The room breaks into two while spoons scrape, half breaking into bursts of conversation and the other half working fastidiously on a local puzzle my Someone and I left on the table, hardly started in hopes for a little help. When the time feels right, I pick up some scraps of paper and pens and begin to pass them out. This is where it begins.
“I’ve never done this before…”
“I don’t believe in regrets…”
“What if I don’t know what to write?”
“Will anyone read this?”
The questions come in overlapping waves, and I do my best to assure, talking my way around what I mean, this thing I am still working out for myself. The point, I try and explain, is not to dwell on what we’ve done wrong, but to acknowledge what we don’t want to keep carrying with us. Because really, I don’t think I believe in regrets, either. Or maybe we’ve villainized the word regret too much– that to have regret is to have not lived our best, to have not learned, to be living too much in the past, to have a barrier between ourselves and… ourselves. But regret is also the only word that comes to mind. And by burning it– well, it’s a real statement piece. We send it away. So, I tell my friends that, no– no one else will read it. Yes, we all have something to write. No, you don’t have to believe in regrets to think of something. Yes, it’s okay to be new at this.
With that, we were off. The room got a little quiet, the air a little strange. Then we filed to the kitchen, pulling on jackets and boots and walking out to our cold, snowless yard where my Someone worried himself over wet firewood. We stood in a circle, meditative, trying to take the event serious, but maybe not too serious. That is to say, we were ourselves as we could be teetering between before and after.
“We need to hurry,” my Someone pressed, “this fire isn’t going to stay long.”
I pulled out my pieces of paper, wrinkled in my back pocket, and read what I’d written that morning:
In a new year, we are working– not to become new, better versions of ourselves, but to uncover who we already are. We acknowledge our regrets as a sign that we are learning, that we are consciously taking part in our own lives, that we are aware of our shortcomings. In letting go of these regrets, we are making space within ourselves, but also between ourselves and the people around us so that we may, a little every year, with every small decision, unblock our hearts. We acknowledge, we learn, we let go so that we can know ourselves better, and love ourselves and the people who surround us better.
Into the fire go our regrets, burning up everything until only love is left.
And then, one by one, we burned pieces of paper that for the last few minutes, we had held closely to our bodies, nervously keeping them folded away from anyone else’s eyes. The fire flicked and flipped some, getting gasps from a few, and then sighs of relief as the regrets quickly turned to ash before they could be read. We laughed at our own shyness, at our own secrets, at our own shortcomings. Of course, we have nothing to hide. Of course, we all have something to hide.
Maybe it goes like this: that the baptism, the redemption, the starting new– while it acknowledges how human we are, it insinuates that we will try much harder in the future to be less human. That we will be flawless. That we will be better. That we will be like God. The variation on the theme, and perhaps the love I hold for this new tradition, is that I am not only saying that I am human, but I am also showing myself that being human isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t something I am trying to work out of my system. It isn’t something I need a break or a restart from. It is wonderfully chaotic, oppressively sustaining, joyfully morbid. And, in fact, in carrying this regret into my first and only day of the year to be perfect and new, I am rededicating my commitment to be even more human.
Thomas had prepared a song written for the day. It was heartbreaking and funny and full of the mishaps of 2023. Then we walked quickly back inside. I ladled up hot cups of Golden Milk for everyone while my Someone topped them with shots of espresso for anyone who asked. The kitchen got even smaller as we sipped the fatty, spicy coconut drink, making jokes as we spilled the turmeric liquid or bumped into one another– “There’s my regret for next year!” Yes, yes, yes. Let’s keep building up more regrets. Let’s keep being chancy by running into each other because we are so large and our spaces are so small and we have no choice but to touch each other with the immensity of our humanness.
When the bottom of everyone’s mug showed, hats and scarves were redistributed, and arms flung around necks. Sweeps of cold flew through the door with goodbyes. Two friends remained to finish the puzzle. Then, it was just my Someone and I again. The house was bigger again. I looked for it then– the again again again that rattles in my skull when I have not fulfilled my penitence; when the holy water did not cover every hair on my head.
Regretfully, it declined.
My Someone and I heated up a frozen pizza and sat on the couch to watch a sitcom.
What I’ve been wondering is, when God told you to stop being my friend, was it in the still small voice or the fun Old Testament theatrics?
Was it in the gentle breeze, like the ones we hoped for on your back patio in the stifling late July Michigan summers, where your wild mint and our laughter, both, could not be tamed? Or was it on a gale of wind like the ones that blew out the power lines that one night? Tornado sirens wailing, the sky yellow, and you and I leading our entire families– dogs and all– across the street to your neighbor’s house, where we let ourselves in the basement door and piled on the floor. Your daughter was just a baby then. We sang hymns to make us less afraid.
We were always singing hymns, because you need them and I love them and I always loved to find the things that made us the same. I can see, now, the discomfort it gave you– that while I always sang them from the heart, I did not sing them for my salvation. Which put me in the Gray. Where everything else could be Black and White to you, my love for you and my love of hymns and my love even of god was unsettlingly in a non-category, fuzzed out Gray like an option you can’t click on your computer screen. Was that what made God tell you that you couldn’t be my friend? That made him come down from the throne on the most high to tap your shoulder and let you know that there was no one else that could be sent, that he had to do this himself, that you must be told by him directly and with no uncertainty that I needed to be cast out? It would make sense. I am unmanageable in the ways of Yes or No and Black or White and Anything or Anything. I am faithful but unruly. Loyal but ungroomed. Lovable but feral. Yours but not yours.
So tell me, please– how did he say it?
Were you sitting quietly in the back of a bus when he walked on, plopping into the seat beside you, catty and gossipy and eyes rolling and laughing and saying “When she gets on the bus, let’s not make room for her! Let’s make her sit up there with all of the sinners and the gays and the Catholics!”
It had more tact than that, I hope. You have more tact than that, I can’t imagine you’d let him get away with it.
Was it like Samuel being beckoned by the actual voice of God? Did you feel confused at first, thinking it was your son calling you in the middle of the night? Did you go to check on him and find him still asleep, and then go out to the night sky– the wide starry kind we first met under on an island in New England over sixteen years ago? And did you say “Yes Lord.” And he told you, right there, in the dark with his own voice?
Or maybe it was less conventional. Maybe it was a modern miracle of my face on the body of the Virgin Mary charred with precision on your bread as it popped up from the toaster in your kitchen. The same kitchen we spent our nights talking about our periods and our music and our strange, rattled history of remaining friends in the most unlikely circumstances. The same kitchen you told me that my parents treated me like an enemy. The same kitchen I told you that your husband treated you as a slave. The same kitchen we both said, “I know, I know, I know” and we cried and conceded that the other was right. And when I returned to my mother, and you stayed with the man who keeps you, neither one of us turned the other out in judgment. Instead, we put on the kettle for tea. These moments, these forgivenesses lost for the Lord speaking on a burnt piece of toast.
Maybe it was the writing on the wall, like in the book of Daniel, a hand simply appeared on your bedroom wall, and like he wrote to King Belshazzar that his kingdom was soon over, so he wrote you that our friendship was done. Right there, on the same bedroom walls I painted for you those few summers ago, right after your youngest was born and you were in the deepest dark of your postpartum and those damn dark blue walls that once held you in a cocoon now suffocated you. So we went to the hardware store and I helped you pick a color and for a day and half my Someone and I changed that dark, horrible room into a bright sea green so that you could breathe again as you breastfed in your room, even as you worried over every breath of your tiniest one. Not once, but twice did you feel they weren’t yet bright enough, you still felt the darkness leaking through, and I didn’t care that it was already covered; I only cared that you were so so sad and I would paint for five more days and go through ten more gallons until we left if it meant that this paint would help you not feel so so sad anymore.
Or maybe it was like Jesus himself– a real pro move– in the Garden, praying for this cup to be taken from him, that this burden might be given to someone else. Right there, in the St. Francis garden at the convent next door to your house, the same garden I took all those walks with you since you moved there more than a decade ago, as your oldest boy grew up and grew rambunctious and we’d let him run while we trailed behind with my dogs leashed. In the same garden I took your family photos that year, where you all glowed like an angelic, perfect family. Maybe it was there, and you were taking your daily walk, the one time of day you have to yourself without tiny fingers crawling on your body and little voices screaming into your ears, and you dug your knees into the earth and begged that the Lord let us remain friends. And just like in the Jesus of Nazareth movie, a light shone down and you knew we were done for.
Which I guess reminds me– did you bargain to keep me? In any of these scenarios, did you beg for a ram to miraculously appear instead? Or even just ask for another friend– a friend that didn’t share so much history, so much care, so much love for you to be taken instead? Because God will do that, you know. Even the crazy Old Testament one. I think if you ask, he’ll notice you’ve been devout enough to let you slay a lamb chop for dinner instead of me.
Maybe I know that every word I write is another piece of shrapnel that surely will tear through the imaginary thread of a chance we have to go back, to ignore your direct orders from God; and yet I cannot help but go forward, believing the truth will set us free. And I wonder, there, if that is how you feel, too, but even more greatly so, as someone who has the real and actual voice of God on their side against me who just has the truth of years and of loving you. It’s a flimsy fight, even I can see that.
So how did he say it? How exactly did God tell you to stop being my friend?
Because over here? I’ve been listening, too, and all she said about you was “Love, love, love her.”
I’m still serving myself up seconds, but the seconds are maybe a little smaller, as were the firsts. It’s a practice in A Little Less that I’m taking more seriously, lest my head explode.
I’m not always a fan of summer, but the vibrations that emit from the sun soaked into the skin, the overwhelm of long days, the heat so thick you can bite it– it’s the worthwhile sustain of a season of hard work. As a fellow musician put it to me this year, “It’s our season of making hay.” It was a relief to hear her say it, as it indicated a couple of things. One, that the corn was and could still be high– there was sustenance on the way. And two, that it was only a season. There was an end in sight.
Now, it is past the end of Making Hay. The days here in northern New Hampshire are inching just above sixty, and the nights below forty, and I have worn three of my favorite sweatshirts this week. Last night, for the first time since April, we turned on our heat. My Someone is finishing up the shed in the back to keep our tools out of winter’s destructive descent, and I am beginning bookbinding commissions for Christmas. We have a few shows here and there, but the season of “making hay” has transitioned into Harvest; and there is still work to be done in Harvest– storing up and setting plans, covering those cracks that will inevitably let in the cold, planting our first cherry tree, and overall trying to lower our heart rates. We’ve overcommitted ourselves this season. So, it seems, though it is Harvest, we are still stuck in the season of acceleration.
And so, I am practicing A Little Less. I will not cancel a cocktail hour with some new friends in town, I will let them know that I will be bringing dark chocolate bars instead of the homemade snacks I’d mentioned. I will not make five courses and dessert for our friends for dinner; but I will make a simple, warm chickpea vindaloo and an easy apple blueberry crisp, with apples from just up the way. And I will be thankful for those apples, as the frost killed off most of this year’s New England crop.
It seems even the apples are demanding that I do with just A Little Less.
We will not accept a last minute show, though Lord knows we need the cash this year, as we pass through at a rowdy bar where nobody will listen and the money isn’t worth the weight in time. Scarcity tells me I’m not working hard enough, that we are desperate. A Little Less is telling me I can do without if it means an extra day at home to sort out the work I already have. Even if that means making do with last week’s groceries. A Little Less also just bought me more time by keeping me from the grocery store.
What A Little Less offers, when I can quiet my scarcity panic, isn’t just an exchange of time. It is a letting go of perfection and pretense. The reward for this is presence. Presence of mind to be laughing with a couple of women in the parlor of a Dead & Breakfast instead of still reeling from a flurry of making snacks– and gratefully accepting Esther’s unfathomably good gluten free pumpkin bread. Presence of peace to take a breath before greeting my new friends at the door instead of putting the finishing touches on dinner. Presence of time to spend in this achingly beautiful season with my Someone, cozied up on the front porch with hot apple cider we pressed ourselves with our friends who we didn’t have to cancel with because we decided that it’s okay to have a little less on our schedule. Presence of quality as we quit watching TV on weeknights and find ourselves, instead, engrossed in good work or good books. Presence of patience to work as long and as hard as we can, but to lay it down for tomorrow if we don’t finish it today.
Presence to forgive ourselves and the people around us for taking too much time to do and not enough time to be.
That is to say, what A Little Less offers is A Little More.
I am not ready yet for winter, my favorite season. But when I imagine it, I see long waiting stacks of books being read, cookies being baked, slow mornings where the alarm is not set, a tidy house ready for the season, and somehow magically all of my necessary work to be done tied up. What I know to be true is that loose ends will abound, dust will accumulate with the dog hair, the work of next year will somehow become more pressing than the library book I wanted to finish, and house projects will be halted midway by an unexpected snow– not to resume til the spring.
There will be no time, time, time. Except, maybe, if I start practicing now, here in the Harvest, winter will come as quiet as the snow. A little less time on my screen, on my worries, on my scarcity; a little more on the work at hand, the community I love, the friends I need. Day by day by day.
“I’m sure you know why I’m calling you,” Ann said.
I did. She stayed on the phone with me for an hour while she recounted his final hours. I was grateful for the time, knowing she had a list of others to call and another list of arrangements to make. Because while he was my fill-in Dad, he was her husband.
Tom was gone.
After a fight with bone cancer, he’d made it. He was in the clear. And then, in some sort of messed up technicality, an infection took hold of his depleted immune system– an infection that I could have right now, at this minute, and not even know it because my body would just wipe it clean away– and it killed him. The stone that took down Goliath.
I stayed quiet when I hung up. My Someone tried to comfort me, but I wasn’t quite ready. I was already fast forwarding to healing. I made a mental list– more yoga, more writing, long walks, lots of kale. I stood up, grabbed the keys, and drove to the grocery store. I chose a small basket of organic vegetables. I bought dog food. When I returned, my Someone had cleaned the camper. We hitched up and we drove out of Fort Collins, heading toward the wide skies of Wyoming, silent all the way.
While the sun set, I imagined Tom riding the mountains on his Harley– up and over and beyond, just out of my sight line. I’d think of it just long enough to catch the rock in my throat, then I would breathe deep, letting it dissipate, letting the tears well up, and then… nothing. There was no riptide of grief to carry me away.
I self congratulated on my ability to self heal, to prepare myself adequately in order to simultaneously deal with grief before the event itself even happened, and carry on with my work, and be cognizant enough to know that I was, in fact, grieving.
Of course, I’m an idiot. I didn’t account for the Yips.
In May, I’d received a similar call. Tom was on a downswing. I was prepared. We were on our way home from a 2 1/2 month disaster tour– broken transmission, bronchitis, the works. We had three weeks to sleep and release an album and host some company and secure our house before we were gone again for another 2 1/2 months. And in this, Tom wavered on the edge of the wall that separates the living from the dead. I kept myself alert. We left our home on June 2nd heading west, prepared to turn our rig around at any moment and head to Ohio.
The second tour was a bit smoother, and we relished in the beginning of summer newness– the long light, the cool nights. But then, there was an unmistakable strangeness. While the tires held and our bodies felt strong and easy, each time on stage was wiggly. I held my instruments as I carefully and unsteadily hold newborns. The lyrics evaded me until the last second. I dropped chords and words, small at first, then swapping entire verses. I couldn’t remember how to do what I’ve been doing for the last twelve years. It wasn’t stage fright, exactly. I could easily stand in front of audiences, talking between songs, moving about it like an office worker in a boring cubicle. But the playing was strange.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I told my Someone.
“Maybe it’s just stress?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, “It’s like I don’t even like this anymore.”
This worried him. For all of my love of music, it has never been my one-and-only. I find within me a current of creativity. Dam the river one way and it’ll come out another. I’ve had to overcome years of intense, debilitating stage fright to do what we do now. It required countless nights of talking me onto the stage again, of shaking uncontrollably, of near tears until I burst into song, the nerves subsiding only near the end of the set list. He didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t move forward.
“I’ll figure it out,” I promised. I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to do what I do again. But without the pointed weirdness of being. It was the only way I could explain it when I called Bryan. It was now the second week of tour, and the feeling persisted.
“Oh, you have the yips!” he said.
I have a lot of interests, but sports are not any of them. Bryan kindly explained the sensation I was feeling back to me, but in terms of a pitcher holding the ball.
“He’s a very good pitcher, too, but this thing he does all of the time, this thing he and everyone knows he’s good at, it’s suddenly strange and foreign to him. Like, he can’t figure out how the ball used to feel in his hands.”
I had the yips. I was so relieved. What an easy thing, to name something, and then for it to go away.
They didn’t go away. But now, at the end of a show, when my Someone would ask, “How was that one?” I could say, “I still had the yips, but it was easier.”
Except it wasn’t easier. It was getting harder.
We were writing more. I made little books mid week to pass the time and fill the merch table. We took walks across the Midwest and into the West and the yips followed me. I was neither homesick nor happy. I relished the summer water any chance my body could fall into it. We evaded the hottest days in a record high temperature summer in the west. We had all the luck. Excepting that the stage each night was a vacuum of reality, and I’d fall into the silence of my previous experience into a chaotic hole of panic until the last notes were sung. I developed a pre-show ritual. I meditated. I did more yoga. I practiced more than we ever had on tour.
And then, in Fort Collins, CO I got a call from my dear friend.
“I’m sure you know why I’m calling you,” Ann said.
The yips were gone, at least for Wyoming, Utah, and then Wisconsin on the homeward trek. We’d watched the funeral from a board room in a public library in Wyoming. Ann insisted we stay on the course of our tour, that she’d wait for the burial service til we were passing through on our way home. It was an unbelievably charitable gift of closure, as she waited wide open in her grief for our arrival.
I wrote her a song, one for the love of she and Tom, for the stories too good to lay to rest. But while the yips had relented, the deep cavern of nothingness took its place.
“I am in grief,” I told my Someone and myself. But still I couldn’t feel it. Instead, I took a week’s worth of hot yoga classes.
“I am in grief,” I practiced again, and had no recollection of the performance I gave, whether it was good or bad. Instead, I took two long walks with my dogs. I tried to find the button inside that lets the mounting pressure of grief at last release, like a sprinkler system to a fire alarm. But the alarm within me kept ringing, and still no release. I couldn’t find it. I concluded instead that I must be beyond it. I must have yoga-ed and walked and written my way above it.
The yips returned.
We played our final show in Wisconsin, and I became furious and exhausted with myself. We stepped on to the stage. We played a couple of songs. Then, I asked the audience if we might play them a new one. I told them about Tom. I stopped performing. I stopped trying to put on a good show. I stepped into myself. I played them the song.
Now I was getting somewhere.
When we got to Ohio the next day, I was dreading it and couldn’t wait to get there– all at once. I stopped telling myself I was in grief. I’d decided that function was broken. I’d done enough. I was in the clear. The alarm kept ringing in my head.
I sat next to Tom’s ashes the next day as we drove to Pennsylvania. There, over the water of the reservoir I’d driven countless times in my college years on my way between my family and my chosen family, the alarm reached its height, and at last the release came.
The graveside service was short, on a sunny, pretty morning. The heavy marble that held my person, my guy, my damn-I’m-proud-of-you-kid voice that stood on top of all of the other voices– including my own– for the last two decades: he was put into the ground.
I did not tell myself I was in grief. I did not calculate the methods in which I would heal. I simply watched as someone who was always there was no longer there. I placed dirt on top of him and turned away. I lingered. I looked back. I let the electricity of impending grief make way for the soft, painful suffocating pillow of it. I cried and fell into a hole within me that had been freshly dug, too. Because grief is not the putting out of a fire. It is a vacancy forever unfilled. One must become adept at working around it for the rest of one’s life. But first, one must lie in it.
In August, it seems, I bury my people.
I am in grief, now, though I don’t much tell myself that. I don’t need to. I am no longer justifying extra yoga practices or the solitary time I spend journaling. I am no longer approaching my grief as a measure of self improvement, a progress report on my emotional evolution.
The yips have more or less subsided. It makes sense, now, that the core of my ability to connect with others would be inextricably tied to my ability to be honest with myself. Of course I had the yips. I didn’t know who I was without Tom. The only thing that ever worked for me as a performer getting over my stage fright was to be myself. Myself lying in a hole of grief within me was not a vulnerability I was willing to share, so I held my breath against the impending change. I was holding my breath for Tom. Now, with his last exhale, I exhaled, too. And while not all at once, I am working around the new vacancy. I am learning myself again, who I am with this new emptiness. And I am coming back, this altered version of myself, and learning to share it again.
I am a woman of prayer now. I guess as I have always been.
We left our home in New Hampshire on my Someone’s birthday at the beginning of June, holding our breaths as our home of 8 years rattled down I-91 through Vermont, hoping this tour would prove better than the last. I say hoping and not praying because I didn’t know yet that I am a woman of prayer. Last tour we survived a busted transmission, two strains of bronchitis, food poisoning, our dog almost dying, among a myriad of small paper cuts from the universe. For all of that, we felt pretty good, even if a little nervous.
Our first stop landed us in a church in Upstate New York, a small town outside of the City that brims with quirk and quiet in the way that a celebrity pretends to be a nobody in public but secretly wishes someone else will notice anyway. We arrived at the rain location of our show that evening, decked out with a stained glass Jesus who looked to be about to inject a woman with a hypodermic needle and another Jesus who seemed to be sending the Apostle Peter adrift into the sea, head turned in a Bitch, Please fashion. I like these give-no-shits Jesus’, the kinds that just can’t with these chronic requests, anymore. I am far more comfortable with the relatable disgust of the world’s savior than with the eternal patience feigned by his followers, the passive aggressive “I’m praying for you” of which I’m frequently the recipient. Until later that night, when I met Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles.
We followed our host to his home, instructed to bypass his driveway for the following parking lot, a large blacktop of an Episcopalian church. When we pulled in, a big pick-up truck was idling in front of the parsonage, a man inside shooting the breeze with another squat man hanging outside of the truck, smoking a cigarette. The smoking man waved our direction, but we ignored him as we turned ourselves around and parked, trying to look intentional enough to scare the intruders away. I told my Someone to cross the lawn to our host’s house while I got the animals settled. I’d just placed the hamster inside when the idling truck drove away and the smoking man called across the lot, walking toward me. I steeled myself until he got closer and said,
“Hi, I’m Charles. I’m the pastor here. I’m sick to death of it, but most people call me Father Charles,” at which point he broke into a thick Long Island accent, “‘Fathah Chahles! Fathah Chahles! Pray for me!’ Damn I’m sick of that shit. Don’t call me Father, just Charles.”
Much like with my Jesus of the hypodermic needle, I was immediately at ease. We talked music and travel in the dark parking lot, until my Someone approached, calling out, “Hello” in the gritted way he does when he feels unsure whether or not I’m okay. I assured him immediately, “Hey! Meet Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles, he lives here.” Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles said hello and lit another cigarette. He told us about his ex wife, his kid, his want to hit the road like we did. We told him about our house in New Hampshire, close to Dartmouth.
“Dartmouth!” he said, “That’s some luck if you ever get sick.”
“We know it,” I said, “we have a pal with cancer right now, and we’re awfully grateful for him to be so close.”
Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles looked at me closely without pause, “What is his first name?”
“John,” I said.
“I will remember John this evening when I pray,” he said, then he took a puff while I took a breath, shot the shit a little more, then said goodnight. But I couldn’t get it out of my head– out of my heart, really. This was a prayer I believed in. He didn’t ask details, he didn’t even ask for a last name. His measure of reciprocation was in balance with the measure of which we knew one another, of which I shared, of which the situation warranted. His response wasn’t performative or grandiose. He didn’t ask that we stop the conversation– that we stop seeing each other in the moment– to offer supplication to an Unknown. He didn’t reach over and look at me meaningfully while he held my hand and said, “I will pray for you.” But he didn’t brush me off, either. This was an act of reactive compassion– not from years of being a pastor, but from years of listening. As if he can’t help but care. Whether or not there is a god above to receive Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles’ prayer, the prayer was complete and heard because Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles heard me, told me he heard me, and held lightly and carefully in his hand the deep pain and fear I was accidentally expressing by telling a relative stranger about my friend who he will never meet.
Prayer, I learned, is not about telling god that we need something. Prayer is telling each other that we see and hear them. Then later, in the silence of our bedrooms with hands folded and eyes closed, we are holding a little space and time amid the clatter of catastrophes so that we, in the act of being selfishly wrapped up in someone else’s problems, can see and hear ourselves, too.
The skies muddied with smoke as we drove west, crossing nervously over the Canadian border as a shortcut to Michigan. The wildfires in Alberta were seizing the air right out from under our lungs, and by the time we arrived in Hamilton, Ontario in the early afternoon, a permanent haze sat over our friends’ home. After the first hugs since pre-pandemic and a tour from their sprout of their new dinosaur bedsheets, we settled in the garden for black bean tacos and then coffee. We rolled through the afternoon without noting the time, then stretched our legs on a walk with the dogs before we had to head again for the border.
Piper, stunning and round, days from a labor that would bring her a second little sprout, held out a small paper bag. I could smell it before she gave it to me– homemade soap pressed with rose petals, a beeswax hand salve, and a tall bunch of white sage wrapped in string. They’d grown it themselves last year.
“To burn for a better tour this time,” she said. I was grateful. We needed it. At the last moment, she thought of one more thing. I took a handful of small oranges gifted to me and piled them into my backpack. Then I ran down the stairs to my waiting family in the truck. We were full in belly and in spirit, and we drove away quickly to try and shed the sting of missing our friends which was already radiating. We were almost to Michigan when I got Piper’s text.
We just found your dropped sage.
I sunk. It had fallen on their front steps. It must have been knocked out by the bunch of oranges. Maybe this tour was going to be another doozy, after all. I felt ungrateful, disproportionately upset to have not cared for it better. Then,
But it will be here when we see you next and we will burn some for your journey.
Of course. The smoke of the sage on my behalf may be better than the smoke I make myself. Without asking, Piper had heard my prayer, and offered it up. I imagined the small lilty stream of sage smoke twirling upward in her house, out her screens, and mixing with the haze of the Alberta wildfires that hung around us. A smoky chorus on my behalf. Maybe a small prayer like that couldn’t be detected by the less devout eye. But me, I knew it was there, or going to be there. I was heard and I was seen and I was loved.
Piper, hear my prayer. Just like that, I was less alone.
We landed in Michigan before nightfall, and I felt the weight of the absence I’d been avoiding. It is in this state that my friend lives– my friend who has been my friend as long as my Someone and I have known each other; my friend who carefully told me she prays for me in earnest; my friend who does not speak to me anymore on the basis of needing to choose Christ over me. I’ve resented her prayers in the past, wrapped in sympathy and in a hope that I might one day find true joy in the lifeless judgmental faith that drives her. In recent years, I’ve come to accept her prayers, and even cherish them. If for a moment I might raise to the top of her mind, it doesn’t matter where those thoughts escape to from there– whether to a loving god or a spiteful one, the part that counts is the tethers that bound her heart to mine in those prayers.
I sent out my own prayer, in a text, to my friend Annie. I cast my cares upon her then told her I would throw those cares into Lake Michigan when I get there. Annie is my circle of trees, my shade and my root system and my barrier. I pray to her often, even when we aren’t able to speak. It happened this night that she heard me immediately.
It may be one less tree, but this one is rooted so deep it’s not going anywhere.
Annie, hear my prayer.
I slept better that night.
In the morning, we found a trail next to our camper, leading miles from the parking lot. Six miles later, we returned, dogs panting and our skin a little darker, the first bloom of summer on our bodies. A piece of paper fluttered across the sidewalk. I picked it up. It was a grocery list, sensibly, in the grocery store lot.
Mac n cheese Marleigh Almond milk English Muffin Fruit cups Breakfast (Renee) Marleigh nuggets Breakfast Sausage Ramen noodles Leaf lettuce
It took me a couple of reads to understand that Marleigh was a person, not a brand. I imagined from the cursive that it was a Grandmother, preparing a visit from her granddaughter. I imagined her the night before, calling and asking her daughter-in-law what it was that Marleigh would eat– would she like something special? Does she eat vegetables? She jots down the ideas as they come, hangs up, and presses the list into her purse. Not until she is leaving the supermarket the next morning, bags rustling as she juggles the cart out from under the hatchback does that list slip from her hand and wave off to the far end of the parking lot, where a woman and her dogs and her Someone are walking.
This list, I thought, is a prayer. A prayer that, when acted upon, may just come true– that Marleigh would have a really nice time with her grandmother. That she would get enough to eat. That she would be happy here. That she would feel loved. I tucked the list into my journal and prayed the same. I hope Marleigh has a most wonderful time.
“You’re putting a curse on her, you know,” my Someone said to me. We were in Minneapolis. The smoke had dissipated, but the heat remained. It was a thick 90 degrees in the afternoons, and we were walking the neighborhood hoping for sprinklers with our dogs.
“What do you mean?” I asked, but already knowing.
“I feel like when you write a song for songwriters, it curses them, it makes them unable to write again.”
“But she already quit writing,” I said.
“True, but it’s like you’re sealing the deal or something.”
I thought about it. We’d just written a song for my friend, the one who might still pray for me but doesn’t speak to me anymore.
“But your ex girlfriend wrote songs about you and you still write,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “but I sang through it. I kept writing, which breaks the spell.”
I like witch stuff. Very much. It’s why I like Christianity sometimes– the weird spells and rituals and vengeances; the miracles and the incantations; the pretending of drinking the blood of the dead. But this felt distinctly different.
I thought of my friend Tom. Years ago, as his wife and my friend Ann tells it, they were on an RV trip around the country. Everything had gone wrong, as things on RV trips are wont to. While I couldn’t recall the details of the mishaps, the story culminates at a campground late one evening when they finally found a place to stay, and one more hiccup occurs. Tom, a very tall and imposing figure, is furious. He drops the tools he was holding, stands straight, looks up with his hands open and shaking and yells at the sky–
“BRING IT OOOOON!”
As Ann tells it, the sky ripped open and it began pouring rain on his head.
An answer to prayer.
“No,” I said to my Someone, “I am not cursing her. I am daring her.”
Because, as I understood in that moment, a dare is also a prayer. A dare is a call for whatever may come to come as it may, and to bring with it the fury and the force, however unpleasant. Because sometimes, when everything is wrong, a sudden burst of thunderstorm on one’s head would at least clear up the confusion of the pregnant silence that bullies between a man and a god; or presses between two friends.
I can’t curse anyone– especially not someone who is already creating their own hell. They’re already cursed by their own hand. Instead, I pray by writing a song. I make a dare, for something to happen. The importance of a prayer is not that it is answered, but that the sound or the smoke or the water or the tree limbs of it rise up and are heard by someone– anyone. Even if that person is yourself.
Maybe my friend is still praying for me. Maybe it is frustrating for her, because she prays and prays to a god in the sky and she has seen no rain and has smelled no smoke and has had no one put her favorite kind of chicken nuggets on their grocery list in return. But I’m hopeful one day to do her the favor that I’ve been given again and again. I want to give her the gift of someone else looking at her and saying, “I heard that.”
I’m Taoist by practice, Christian by nurture, and Agnostic by nature.
Thanks to Pride last weekend, I’ve been born again. The good news bubbles forth, and I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me.
In Tallahassee, we garnered ourselves in rainbow sunglasses and tie dyed shirts and headed downtown with our niece to the event. There were people of all sorts smiling and laughing, and strangers greeting each other like old friends when they accidentally bumped into one another on their way to the virgin pinacolada stand that served up each drink in an entire pineapple. We saw community members let loose, and allies offer help with anything from health care to banking, a church or two alongside American Atheists for whatever spiritual or social gaps that need be filled.
And there were free Mom Hugs and Dad Hugs and Parent Hugs, wandering around in descriptive t-shirts, just in case you needed to hear it from someone who knows best– that you are loved just as you are, just as you came into this world.
This was the moment for me. I stepped off the path and took several deep breaths and cried as my Someone put his arm around me and my niece placed her hand on my arm, “It’s okay, Aunt Mallory.”
Here, the scales fell from my eyes. I was placed squarely inside of the church. Or, at least, what the church was supposed to be.
How very Tao, the reckoning, the balance.
It should be known, and is well documented, that upon a conversion experience, one is often met with resistance. A person cannot grow heavier or lighter with good news and not change the balance of the boat they are in. And so, at first, was the antagonizing words of strangers. Some call them trolls, and while I like the image of wide glassy eyed sexless creatures with wild florescent triangular hair on the other side of the computer screen, thinking their most unwelcome thoughts and putting them into the public sphere, I’ve also come to understand that this category isn’t always fairly attributed. Sometimes, people just can’t read the room on the internet, and it takes a little finagling to help them see where they are. As a newborn myself in the previous hours, I understood the excitement of sharing. This stranger from Nebraska finally refrained, and onward I walked in my new faith.
“I have to tell you something,” I told my Someone the next day. “I am actually the best at Christianing that I have ever been. Remember that guy on the internet? Young Christian Mallory would’ve flown off the handle. But look at me! I didn’t yell or say names or anything. I Taoed the shit out of that and my Christianing is off the charts.”
“You’re really killing it,” he said. “You’ve been born again.”
I don’t need to reclaim or reframe Christianity or Jesus, anymore. I’ve realize now, it’s always been there for me.
It all made sense now. You’re just supposed to love people.
Who knew it was that simple?
And then it isn’t simple.
My excitement grew. I told my friends. I spent long video messages bursting with the understanding, the good news. Then, I told them about the not-troll from Nebraska.
How strange, I told them, for one’s impulse to call sin what is love.
The conversation turned. My friend of many years was uncomfortable, felt pressed.
“It is sin,” she said. The conversation turned again.
“If I had to choose between my friends and Christ,” she said, “I would choose Christ. Always.”
“Yes,” I said to her, “if you had to choose, choose Christ. Because this isn’t Abraham beneath an erratic jealous God, holding a dagger above his son’s neck to prove his loyalty. This is Jesus we’re talking about. So, yes, choose Christ. Because Christ would choose me. He always chooses me.”
My friend is not talking to me, anymore. She needs space.
We ask a lot of Jesus, I think. Make us comfortable. Die for sins. Act as scapegoat to our need to take responsibility for our actions. Take the wheel. But from what I gather, mostly all he wanted was to party sometimes, spend some time in nature alone, and maybe occasionally have some conversations. To be a friend. And that message of Jesus isn’t always easy to swallow amid the laundry list of things we need from him. It doesn’t have that Fox’s Book of Martyrs material we’d always imagined as young zealots. It’s too damn ordinary.
The Word, Letter of Mallory to her Friend, Chapter 16, Verse 21-37.
Greetings to you with the warmth of Christ, the laugh of Buddha, and the brief smell of jasmine from an early morning walk!
I have seen and heard the good work of you and your sisters and brothers, and I am delighted by the news. You have cared for the sick, prayed for the hurting, and welcomed in those who need a shower. Keep it up! You’re doing great.
But there is an element that needs reckoning, and I’m afraid it will be difficult to hear, as when I heard it a long time ago– with my Christian Nationalist conditioning– I really didn’t like it. But be assured, on the other side, there is freedom in Christ, and you’ll get to party with him and everyone else at Pride. There are pineapple drinks, you def don’t want to miss it.
If someone chooses someone else to love, regardless of what gender the person is, it is not a sin. To believe it IS a sin is to harbor bigotry, and as seen by your good work already, we know that you are far too compassionate to harbor hate. It would be easy here to cry out, to say that this is an attack on your faith, but it is not. Christ did not come to comfort the oppressor, but to challenge the chains. Your belief, while isolated in a small church with like-minded people, does not remain isolated. This belief is one that seeps like a toxic gas from beneath your church doors, into the streets and the voting booths, and declares other people second class citizens. Because of this belief, they must fight for their dignity, their basic rights, and in too many cases, their lives.
I say this, not as a friend against a friend defending a faceless othered entity– the faceless entity you harbor your bigotry for are the very tangible faces of my friends and myself. I say this as a friend who is for their friend, and I would be a poor friend who allows the indignity, because it is also an indignity to you.
Consider this– your children. As you teach them this belief– that some love is a sin– you perpetuate a lie. When, inevitably, your children grow up and are out from under your carefully and best intentioned canopy, they will be confronted with this lie. It is problematic in many ways to equate the bigotry against the LGBTQIA+ community with the racial justice movement, but acknowledging the differences and that we are in fact only in the beginning of eradicating the deathly plague of racism, consider the likeness.
As we grew up, remember the textbooks we read, where we saw the movement of people fighting for their right to sit at lunch counters, vote, be alive. And remember, then, seeing the timeline and realizing that our grandparents, our parents coincided with this time. And remember having to ask the difficult question–
“Mom, Dad– what side were you on?”
I grew up in the depths of racism. I did not know a person of color, and it was kept that way with intention on my behalf. I heard words I knew instinctively were bad, before I ever heard the word racism. I have blamed my parents and their parents for the bigotry they held, and the bigotry they passed on to me. Especially in light of the clear hindsight of history. They misused the same book to justify this hatred as is now misused to call love a sin. They were wrong. I have since forgiven them, letting them suffer on their own island, breathing in their own toxicity, where still they gather like-minded people to pray for their right to hold their strangling beliefs as love and Christ and common sense pounds on the door asking them again and again to reconsider. But the more difficult task has been to forgive myself, for the perpetuation of these beliefs, for the slow unlearning, for the ways which I have acted out– knowingly and unknowingly– the prejudice I was taught.
This forgiveness for you will need to be begged from your children when the history books are inevitably written, and the vapid answer to the hard question, “What side were you on?” is “Not of love.” And then will start the long process of your children forgiving themselves, too.
This is prophecy, one we may or may not choose. But prophecy remains hypothetical, and not always as convincing as the present. So, let us lay out the present. What is there to be afraid of? Remove the statistically unfortunates of car accidents and disease. We live in a world of rising waters and ever-more limited air. We live in a world where we and our children must consider that the act of going to school or a movie or a birthday party or a church may be the last decision we make. In a world where a big yellow school bus may very well cart the ones we love more than we love ourselves to a classroom that is turned into a death trap with the rattle of gunfire echoing off of hallway walls and on to the soft, sweet bodies of our perfect creatures. We live in a world where men are making monsters of themselves. Why then– how does it benefit any of us?– to make unnecessary monsters of people just like us: people who want to marry and send their kids to school and enjoy this perfect, precious life before it is taken from them by force or by time? We live in a world full of things to be afraid of. We need not create them.
Or.
Or, we could choose love now.
I am coming to visit soon. I hope after this letter I will be accepted. I hope you know that this letter is as much to myself as it is to you. May the face of Christ shine upon you, and the dirt we all inevitably turn to when we lose our conscious selves into the Nothing and become dirt again yield you a good harvest.
The glow will fade, I’m sure of it. That’s the last step in a conversion. You go hogwild with the good news, you tell the world, you tell your friends, and then, in the ordinary, you forget. I’ve rededicated my life to Jesus and causes and to the earth enough times to know. But maybe it’s not forgetting. Rather, these are the waves of the Tao, the water that moves and is unnameable. In the ordinariness– in the quiet nothingness– that is where the imprint is found. The mark of a change that comes from seeing the Burning Bush is not the bright light specks that flicker in the eyes for the moments after. Eventually, I need to see again, so that I can take one normal step in front of the other. The next right thing. The pulling of all those logs from my eyes while I sought the specks of dust in others. Sorting righteous anger from just being a dick– something I wish the Apostle Paul’s editors would’ve considered. The cleaning and the cooking and the voting and the listening and the learning until, again, I meet in the middle of a town, dressed in rainbows, finding that mountaintop experience. That I will continue to grow in the meantime, that is faith.
Last week my Someone and I took a walk around a graveyard just before the South Carolina line on I-95 while we waited for our clothes to dry at the laundromat. I spotted a familiar last name on the gravestone closest to us, and called out–
“Look, it’s Dave.”
“Oof,” said my Someone, but then he spotted another last name, and added– “…and Megan!”
And off we went, naming our very living friends while walking among the very dead. We were halfway when I thought better of it.
“Is this morbid?” I asked.
“Maybe a little,” he said.
But then we continued, calling out Laurie and Brian and Amanda and Sandra Bullock. Then I said,
“Mallory,” pointing to the lone stone with GRAHAM etched across the front.
“No,” said my Someone suddenly. I paused. “Why did you pick yourself?”
“Because,” I said without thinking, “I felt left out. I wanted to be with my friends.”
With our recent road hiccups– another major break down on a tour we’ll be lucky to break even on– and the illness that has saturated our friends’ bodies, and the emotional despair that stamped me down to almost breaking last month: the isolation was stifling. As we walked and named, I felt myself become lighter. By the time we reached the gates, it was as though we’d gone to a full party. Le Danse Macabre worked its magic, and I was leveled again with the delight of death’s equalizing force.
Today, I am 37. I am one step closer to someone calling my name above a lone stone etched with GRAHAM, and the reminder brings me an unprecedented amount of life.
I am heavy with gratitude, as texts pile in from friends I made a decade and a half ago. What a miracle it is, that in this short sprint of living– where I can barely manage to keep track of where I last set down my phone or the postcard I wrote to my niece last week that needs a stamp but now I can’t find it– that I have managed to keep anything at all, let alone people who have equally shifted and become new people each seven year stretch when their cells revitalized and their thoughts on god morphed into an abyss of more questions than answers. They lose their keys and their favorite lighters and their bad habits, but have not managed to lose me. And the work it takes to manage the keeping of one’s friends far exceeds that of keeping one’s favorite pen. How do we manage keeping even one person orbiting our atmosphere at all, let alone multiple?
I am heavier with gratitude this year than years before. I’ve formed the opinion this week that friendship doesn’t quite blossom until at least 15 years, and I am in the thick of spring in my friendships, with new seeds germinating as I watch the petals unravel on the others.
I’ve become recently obsessed with the French tune Cou Cou, the Django Reinhardt avec le Quintette du Hot Club de France version, particularly this line–
Eveillez-vous, Eveillez-vous– le monde est transformé.
I’m very early in my learning of the language, but I was confused by this particular line. I knew reveiller to mean wake up; but this, this was spelled incorrectly. A quick google search showed that the meaning is the same– both are to wake up. But taking a look closer, the meaning is subtly changed. Reveiller is to wake up habitually– the habit of every morning when our alarm goes off or the sun shines in our eyes. But Eveiller— this isn’t your average wake up call. This is a deeper, nearly spiritual sense of waking up– this is awakening. The singer isn’t asking us to wake up to see that the world looks different, she’s asking us to awaken ourselves, our deep cellular selves, and see that the world is transformed– which inevitably means we are changed, too.
And this is the ordinary miracle: It takes years of habitual waking up– of putting in the phone calls and the texts and the happy birthdays and the showing up– to arrive at a place of awakening. There I go, reveillez-vous, reveillez-vous for days, and one time I wake up and I’m 37 and voila– I’ve awakened to a plethora of love I can recall in moments with my monthly book club meeting, or in the middle of a cemetery surrounded by my friends’ names. It is an accumulation and luck of the draw, hard work and stupid chance that I have aligned myself with friends and fellow artists and acquaintances that fill my timeline in such a way as to transform it, one waking up at a time, until we wake up no more and keep one another’s bones company as some young 36-year-old walks above us, placing their friends lives upon our own, transforming the world with their heavy, deliberate steps around and around again.
Quartz from Pallets 