The Green Study

In late February, I was supposed to meet a writing acquaintance for coffee. It was a strange place she’d picked – a brewery by night, located in an industrial area I’d never been to. After getting lost, I found the place tucked behind several warehouses. I waited half an hour for her, sent a message, but heard nothing. Finally I decided to sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee and read the book I’d tucked in my bag: My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by Carl Phillips.

I’ve left for last the most important and obvious yet most often overlooked or underestimated part of any writing practice: living one’s life attentively. Any poem I write is at some level both a record and an enactment of what it means to live inside a human body for a particular few moments in time.

– Carl Phillips, My Trade is a Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

For those particular few moments in time, in this strange coffeehouse, alone and unsure, I made a decision to turn the pages of this slim volume on a dark wood table sipping a coffee, surrounded by strangers. I decided to no longer wait, but to be there.

I was raised in an evangelical religion, so regardless of my now atheism, one of my favorite hymns will always be “Amazing Grace”.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;

My favorite line is I once was lost, but now am found.

Grace is this magical word, whether it be by divine gift or benevolent thought. It is the thing we are least likely to give to ourselves or to others in times of duress. It takes skill and presence of heart to exercise.

I have not been giving myself much grace and the result of that is that I’m wandering in a forest of wild and overwhelming emotions. I keep making half-hearted efforts to find my way to a path, returning to all things tried and true that have, in the past, reminded me that I will be okay.

This last week, I returned to a therapist who I had not seen in nearly 20 years. She nodded quietly after I unloaded what precipitated my return.

You are in the middle of a perfect storm. You are extremely vulnerable right now.

Her words bordered on fortune cookie vagueness, but how could she formulate anything, hearing all that I’d said in the course of an hour?

I realized that I’ve been grieving for a long time, maybe for years. Not a steady rock in the stomach, but a recurring shadow that slides in and out with regularity. Those lists of life’s most stressful events? Check, check, and check…I can intellectually acknowledge that I’ve been dealing with a lot and still be incapable of processing it emotionally. I’m a pragmatic person. I only keep what is in front of me on the docket. What’s the next thing that needs to get done? Who’s the next person I need to take care of? Where is the next problem that must be solved? This myopic method only works for so long, before the cracks start to reveal themselves.

I remember doing my first 15-mile road march in the Army with a full pack. I could not think about the 15 miles, just the next marker, the next tree, the next steps. And when I was done, I was too tired to acknowledge the journey, too focused on the next obstacle to acknowledge the painful knees, blistered toes, and aching back. I was also 40 years younger. Maybe those hadn’t become a thing yet.

Now, at 58, everything has become a thing. Every trip to the doctor invites a new diagnoses and one ends up feeling like a collection of parts held together by duct tape. Family of origin issues return and trip you into a feral state. Your hormones are unpredictable, squeezing the marrow out of the bone and rendering sleep into disjointed states of conciousness. That Talking Heads line How did I get here? plays over and over in your head. While the drumbeat of mortality sounds ever closer.

Last night I dreamt I was on the bus coming home from work. I was dishevelled, carrying all my things without a bag. I dumped them onto the bus seat and immediately began to worry if I had enough money on my transit card. I arrived not at home, but at a hospital. The driver was irritated with me, because it took so long for me to gather up my stuff and I’d forgotten to pull the cord, so I staggered up to the front of the bus.

I wandered into the hospital and a nurse yelled at me that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I looked down and there was a run in my hose. Yes, even my dreams are dated. My last impression of the dream was stumbling out of the hospital, dropping things along the way while people were yelling at me. I woke up with this thought: I’m alone.

It’s not a rational thought. I am fortunate to have friends and family and a life that circumstantially is very good. But when it comes to any of us navigating those internal storms, it is true, we are alone. Whether that is a comfort or curse depends on if our compass can guide us right. Mine cannot at the moment. Hence calling in outside help – someone not already in the cast, on the docket, in the mix.

I exist in a liminal state. Waiting for a medical diagnosis. In between the end of a writing fellowship and whatever comes next. Seeing my daughter graduate from college to find her next step in the journey. Processing the psychological bomb set off by an estranged family member. Losing friends to illness or accident.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned my writing acquaintance had died unexpectedly two days before our scheduled coffee. Her loss was already being grieved by her family, while in my world, we’d had a miscommunication and I was waiting for her. She was 62 and had just finished her first novel, parts of which I’d read and given feedback on years ago in a writing group we’d be in. I read through our emails from over the last few years, as if I’d find some clue, something that would insulate me from my own writing and death anxieties. There was no comfort to be found.

This space in which I am wandering is not new to the human condition. But it is mine and I am alone. There’s not much to be done for it except to write what it means to live inside my brain and body for these particular moments in time. I’ve always thought that writing was one of the tools that would help me find my way out of whatever muddle I’d gotten lost in. Now, though, it is an acknowledgment that the muddle, this wilderness of uncertainty, is where I reside at the moment. Whether I find my way out or am found by whatever grace exists, remains to be seen.