Poetry
Journeying
In early January, I broke my left wrist falling on ice. After an eventful and rather macabre trip to the ER, where they reset my bone with the help of the orthopedic version of Chinese finger traps, a strap, a weight, and a very large dose of very thick Lidocaine, I had surgery to repair the bone with the help of a plate and several screws. I had planned to take a retreat mid-January. As it turns out, this wouldn’t have happened wrist or not, because a winter storm bringing snow, wind, and subzero temperatures came through instead. So I didn’t spend my time in a Catholic hermitage where I had to hike to the bathroom, but thanks to my one-armedness, I have had plenty of space and time for my own emergence, to let whatever floats above, around and beneath me surface, be seen, and noted. The results are a kind of emotional tide chart of extreme weather, but also a reminder of the gifts that attention brings.
Here, then, is my record of an interstice:
When given space and time, creativity floods me like a storm surge. There is no dearth, no stem to the tide, only circumstance and an overwhelmed nervous system stop the flow. I could put a shelf up across the kitchen window to hold the plants and get them off the dishwasher. I could add cafe curtains. I could embroider the edges of those cafe curtains. I could write a poem about why my son voluntarily shoveled the front walk in -15 degree weather (hint: he didn’t want his girlfriend to have to wade through snow to get to our house). I could write a book about the possible connection between Jim Harrison, my grandfather, and me. I could actually start wearing all the beautiful handmade clothes in my closet in all sorts of wonderful combinations, rather than wearing my sons’ old cross country sweats everywhere I go. I could paint flowers on the stairwell to the basement, and why stop there? I could paint flowers in my office, in the bathroom.
But also, my wrist hurts. I worry that it won’t heal well, that my partner will go back to his job in Iowa before I can manage on my own, that I’ll slip again on the still very present ice. My interior world swings from manic expanse to something much more dense and sharp. My partner does leave. My boys go back to college. The weather warms and the world turns slushy and grey. I get the car stuck in a snow bank and manage to extricate it after a lot of one-armed shovelling and thirty pounds of birdseed poured under the tires.
I try both to soothe and escape my pitching heart and head. I watch home renovation shows. One is set in Detroit, and the houses are all abandoned and full of trash, broken. They get cleaned out, fixed, made new. I read a rom-com set on a tiny Greek island. It’s warm and sunny there. Life is much slower and more fufilling. I read a book about our current conception of time, how it’s linear and progress driven, when in actuality, time functions more like a labyrinth. In the midst of this imposed calm, I attempt a return to an amputated normal. I plan meals and enlist my daughter to chop the vegetables. I get dressed and have her help me with my jacket sleaves and shoelaces.
Eventually, my emotional wavelength does begin to broaden and flatten a bit. But I also recognize that broken bones, surgeries, and all of life’s other myriad disruptions aside, I’m never a mirror lake. Water always enters from somewhere, disturbing the stillness. I contain multiple, conflicting and contradictory emotions, thoughts, and perceptions, often strong ones, all of the time. My intersticial time gave me a chance to notice and accept them, and my responses to them, as they came. As I said in last week’s Field Notes, and evidentally, need to tell myself again this week, with acceptance comes a quiet that is not necessarily weather dependent. I’m grateful for the reminder of the ground underneath all those waves and for the wherewithall, right now anyway, to perceive it.
Gardening and Making/Mending
We're just wrapping up two weeks of extremely cold and snowy weather. I am overjoyed about all the snow, as we haven’t had much of it the last couple of winters, so we need the moisture. But night time temperatures in the negative twenties, without the windcill, make me much less happy. The morning I broke my wrist, I had gone out for a long walk in fresh snow. While I walked, I listened to Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver, which includes past students, friends, and artists recalling the poet’s influence on them. The recording also contains excerpts of Mary reading her own poems. The natural world infuses each drop of conversation in this audiobook, and as I recall it now, I feel the present barrier between myself and the ouside world like an immovable internal block. I’m avoiding going outside because it’s difficult and dangerous to navigate with a broken bone. When I am out, I’m very focused on getting to and from my car and the house or my car and the store. I can only enjoy the crisp, crackling air, the glittering snow as it blows off a building in the sunlight, in a peripheral way. The absence has felt a bit like trying to breathe with only one functionimg lung. This saddens me, and also reminds me of how much a part of nature I am.
Well, knitting has ground to halt for obvious reasons, and so has any sewing or mending. Books and garden planning have filled the gap left by handwork. I’m always reading, but now I am really always reading, which is good because I have several stacks of books I’m working through. I am generally not monogomous, excepting life partners (a significant detail). In work, in exercise, in intellectual interest, in creative forms, in places to call home, I have a great deal of trouble confining myself to one, two, or even three options. This proclivity can result in too little of a lot getting done and me feeling more frayed than full. In fact, this year, I’m attempting to pay more directed attention to this tendency. Can I channel a bit of my voracious desire (that’s what it is), and welcome more concentrated versions of myself? I hope that some careful curtailing will help me take fuller breaths, be still when I can, and gather more joy for my omnivorous self.
What a beautiful post, Emily. Thank you for ending my very busy week with this calm and reflective loveliness. Your understanding of yourself is so insightful. I hope the wrist heals quickly and properly. And the book about time sounds really interesting. Do let me know what it’s called and I’ll see if I can get it from the library. Unlikely as their ebook selection is mainly commercial fiction! But you never know.
Such a lovely, thoughtful piece. May the wrist heal swiftly!