When all else fails

Slow people at play, in Buffalo, WY

Poetry

"The Mystery"

Some come at it
with weights and measures,
some waving a sieve.
Some sing to it,
ballads and carols,
hoping to coax forth
its hidden center,
unwind the sheath
of who it is.
Some tap on it,
or deal heavy blows
with hammers,
trying to smash
its thick shield
force it to bow down.
Some seek ways to clamber in,
explore its hidden vaults
and chambers.

Some lie down beside it,
breathe its cool scent,
become its own self.

	- Dorothy Walters

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Journeying

When all else fails,

Position yourself cross-legged on the front porch’s flaking wicker love seat, while the morning temperatures are still tolerable and the mosquitoes in hiding.

Sip tea. Breathe.

Watch a house finch balance on a sunflower head, then swing down, like a trapeze artist, to pluck a seed from the dark center.

Pick a small misshapen cucumber from the garden for your lunch. Slice it. Spread mayonnaise and Dijon on toasted bread, add the cucumber and an egg fried in Olive oil.

Peel a peach.

Slip into an empty pool, just you and the bored guard here in the late afternoon. Swim silent, slow laps. Feel the water drain the dis-ease from your body.

Change shorts for pants, layer a long-sleeved linen button down over your t-shirt. Turn up the collar. Don a hat. Slip on your kid’s outgrown Crocs. Douse your wrists and ankles with bug spray.

Enter the garden at dusk.

Pull crabgrass, creeping Charlie, and bindweed from between and beneath the golden Alexander (gone to seed) and the New England aster (still to bloom).

Haul yourself upright.

Wipe rivulets of salty water from your eyes, nose, ears with the hem of the linen shirt.

Look up.

Listen.

To the tenderness.

Hear it in your own beating heart.

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Threshold is on summer break until August 3rd.

In the meantime,

if you missed my chat with Amanda Saint of The Mindful Writer, here it is:

Here’s what Amanda has to say about our time together:

“Emily was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, and she’s been living in the thin space she writes about — one foot in the ordinary world, one foot in something less tangible — more intensely than ever since she received that news. We talked about how the diagnosis pushed her further into that other half of the threshold, and how writing close to the bone, in present tense, close to who she actually is, has become a way of giving her experience care.

We got into the two ways people tend to respond to rupture — hardening and tightening to feel safe, or opening and leaning in — and how writing down what’s happening is often the only way either of us actually finds out what we feel. Emily talked about growing up in a household that didn’t encourage her to have a self, and how a self and a voice only emerged for her about ten years ago, in her own version of upheaval.

We also talked about the strange relief of only ever being able to be who you are, right now, however foggy and always changing that self is — and how that’s both a small grief and a kind of freedom. And about finding, through Substack, other people who never could do cocktail conversation either — who go straight for the big things instead.

It’s an honest, unhurried chat about writing as a way of tending to a life that’s shifted underneath you. I hope you enjoy the replay.”