Instrument

I took three days off work to go to Waldo lake and paddle my broken heart out in the week between Zelda moving to college and the start of the fall intensive. Then Aster got limber tail and I spent the weekend googling limber tail and laying in the bed and packing not at all, cleaning almost none. Sunday night, I gave up. 

You know that edge? Where the anxiety has nearly cancelled out your ability to imagine why you are doing the thing in the first place? I’m trying to reframe that edge. I’m trying to remember that the universe has a say in things. That Aster, a blessed beast who does not think herself with I pronouns, but rather as a body of hunger, curiosity, boredom, and pain, might be an instrument of the universe. I mean, obviously, is. All of us - all of this - eye gesture, arms spread - is an orchestra, or a thousand construction radios playing in the same city block, or a pipe flute on the wind, depending on the day, I guess. But Aster - in her cluelessness about my narrative, in her persistence and proximity, in her obtuse continuation, no matter how my emotional wheel spins - might be, especially, an instrument of the universe re: me. 

I of course have a list I am tending, mostly by making it and remaking it in my mind, and sometimes on paper, and sometimes out loud to someone who is foolish enough to ask what I’m thinking about. The gutters. The taped over vents on the roof. The busted subwoofer in the van, which has turned my stinky but sturdy mom-rocket/ city-truck from my favorite place to listen to music, to my least favorite. The van, in general. Aster’s seat. All the seats. The dog hair, the sand. The entry, where, once again, there is nowhere for coats. The garden. 

Oh, the garden. In May, during sabbatical when I was miserable and throwing money around, I ordered several rolls of 1/4” woven wire mesh, a clipper for said mesh, some landscape staples, and a $100 cream colored paper-thin coated steel garden bin, in a lot of pieces in a box. The box came, heavy as fuck, just as I went back to work, and I put it on the back steps. Between that box, and the increasingly loud equinoctal whispers - prune me, move me, protect me, ease my burden - I have to fight to see the garden as it is now: glowing, full of growth and movement, seeds and secrets, because what I mainly see is winter coming with everyone still in their silky summer nightgowns. Most of all, the whisper of the box: you made a push button purchase you can’t follow up on. And the bamboo, always talking, always growing their rigid and ceaseless underground plumbing, choking everyone else off, springing leaks of flouncy leaves through the peed on soil that I’ve moved every other rooted thing out of. Truth is, I pushed the buy button because I believed in what I saw: a little vegetable garden, again. Kale and beet tops and strawflower in rich afternoon light, with the bamboo as backdrop. 

The cards on Monday morning said: Hierophant, Emperor, 6 of cups. Be the authority of your lil land. If you are in charge here, if you know what to do, if you have vision, then do it. Make the hard choices, set the plan. Then you will be able to welcome everyone in. 

Aster’s tail was at half mast, but the edge had already been crossed, tipped over, fallen off of. I went out angry to the bamboo, a servant of the universe, pick axe in hand. 

no goals

These photos made 9.13 from the side door. It had been raining; it was wet. I, in my slippers, did not step beyond the mat.

Lately, I have been depressed. Since when? We are all here in middle age trying to solve our overwhelm with hormones but, even with the assist, I feel bent helpless, dislocated between the training and surround of my young years, the legacy that came with me out of my mother's cut stomach muscles and wove its way silently through a half-told story I played along with: the irrevocable path from that to this, the world I ache to exist in, soaked in an uncomfortable awareness of the extreme limits and slant of my own perspective, so that even my daily actions feel like ripples of a stone dropped in the deep past. 

Yearning for purpose and community and wisdom: it is so trite. We are here in the foie gras factory: the Earth suffers (the violence of extraction; the violence of mono-cropping; the violence of underpaid, unrepresented labor; the violence of the slaughterhouse) so that we can be stuffed in all our sense holes. The different discomfort I long for: the time and training needed to meet my needs and the needs of my neighbors with my own hands. The lack of that: a cyclic state of fear and agitation, car commute and digital currency exchange, the infinite distraction loop of media and reaction to media - I mean we've all heard it, we all feel it. So trite. 

Years ago I was lamenting the vast ache in me the shape of the public school system in Portland, Oregon, in which I was working at the time. The person I was speaking to, who at the time I thought of as a friend, who neither lived in the U.S. nor worked in public schooling, turned to me impatiently, in what I could only identify as scorn, or rage, and said: if you don't like it, do something about it then. We aren't friends anymore; on bad days his words still plug up my throat, throb in my head. It doesn't help that I can remember him speaking to his own children in the same tone. What a bunch of whiners.

I've been puzzling over the concept of having goals in life. Perhaps this is an American thing? I sense that I am meant to have goals; that if I did, I would feel less lost, less helpless. The public schools which still agonize me, as my second child redoubles the effort to thicken her skin in the fourth week of 8th grade, all have goals: from 84% attendance to 91% attendance for target populations, for example, over the course of 2025-2026. Reading these goals, receiving the daily automated calls from the attendance system, I feel only coercion and surveillance. I do not feel concern or collaboration. There is no one on the other end of the line. This maps pretty well with what I occurs somatically when I reach for a goal right now. 

Even in the garden, I feel dislocated. I am tending, observing, reaching for presence, inviting connection. But the whole thing, despite that I am doing it, that I make choices and enact them, witness the plants' expressions and respond, feels dramatically beyond me. I feel small: a pill bug coming on winter, a moth with tattered wings: either I can do it, but it doesn't matter; or it matters, and I can't. The big box of metal pieces that will become a raised bed; the bamboo sprouting, the failed grass, the thicket of thistles along the fence. How to engage with them without the voice of my ex-friend in my mind, without the robot call: this is a message to inform you that your spirit, infinite and organic, ever changing, dust to dust, was absent today from doing everything it has been assigned.