Flow

Moving like water, understanding that life is beautifully brief, and our task is not to suffer, but to be joyous despite.

1

A kingfisher twitters above the rush of water, his tail twitching with the call. At first I confuse his agitation with that of a robin, but the spiked crown, the stout breast gave him away. I watch until he darts down the river. Only then do I breathe or realize that I have not been before. Catching sight of this shy bird feels like a gift.

2

When my finger brushes over a new nodule, I feel my heart stop then sink. A stone in sludge. I worry I’ve found a death warrant while going for a walk. She seems fine, happy, undeterred by the long, jagged wounds flanking her ribs where the vet removed two foreign masses. I’ve never seen anything like this before, she says, and then she says very little, leaving me to worry the heavy silence like a fraying edge of something precious. You want desperately for it to all stay together, but you can’t stop fingering the threads, pulling them looser and looser until the beauty of the whole dissolves. Every day I am a bird, tossed in the winds of hope and despair.

3

The sun has not yet risen, rendering the sky a streaky watercolor mess of bruised violet and smoke. Something bright like gold attempts to break through. At the wheel I try not to cry, focus on drawing breath, instructing myself like the students I am on my way to teach. Wind blusters the trees. As I pull up to my turn, a bright red ball rolls across the road and disappears into an overgrown yard. A red ball. My mind serves up an early memory of Pen’s first beloved toy - a tiny red ball that she tossed into the air, playing catch with herself. My heart shutters, wishing it to be a sign, a ray of hope. Can it be? I whisper. My brother’s reply comes like the wind, a sparrow arrowing through my heart.

4

When the call comes 10 days after surgery, I’ve already rollercoastered a dozen times. I am depleted. Benign, she says. Panniculitis. I nearly fall to my knees on the sidewalk, relief making water of my bones. We pop champagne that has gathered dust, drink from colored glass shaped like flowers. We laugh and kiss and hug. The dogs watch with tonguey grins.

5

I am more resilient than I have ever been. This is a gift hard-earned. I thank the right medication, found after 20 years of lab-ratting my way through our despicable medical system - but also, the work I’ve done to heal. We should all give ourselves credit for self reflection, mutation, and integration. It’s not easy. Not everyone has the ability, privilege, or means. So those of us that do, we shoulder more than our share of the world’s pain. Or maybe not. I suppose this is a choice.

6

My husband is thankful we do not have children. He worries about the state of the world. I marvel at those who call us selfish for not having a human family when climate crisis threatens to dissolve permafrost, crash icebergs into the sea, rage fire across forests and valleys, clouding the sky with smoke. I think about how profoundly I love my dogs, and I cannot imagine the terror of loving a child in these times. I would do it if I could have, but that is not my calling. My body still aches in more ways than one, that sacred space empty of one thing but full of another. I’ve accepted this. I will give of my heart in other ways.

7

After the election, I cannot get out of bed. I am not surprised. I want to be surprised, to have believed in the greater good but instead I am a soft animal of dread, exhausted. I had a feeling in my bones. Even here in the Berkshires, everywhere there were signs. Literal banners and flags and painted boards nailed to trees. I keep thinking about the yellow house with the giant black banner that screams beneath his name “FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.” How dehumanizing, for what are we other than beings that feel? We pride ourselves on the workings of our mind but most of us are far more driven by our feelings than we care to admit. The person who hung this sign is clearly full of feeling. I wonder if they see the irony. Probably not. I’ve had my heart broken so many times before, that after a privileged day of doing nothing, I get up, shower, and do the things that need doing.

8

At Thanksgiving I share a letter I read in the NYT by a very young girl who described her day after the election. All the girls were crying. All the boys were playing Mindcraft. She’d been a small child during the first administration, still not an adult during the second, and yet she was fully aware of watching her rights and the rights of people she loves crumble. A woman at the table says, That letter is sexist - just because the boys were playing games does not mean they do not care. I feel the implication of this comment is that I, too, am sexist. I find it odd after her many sharings of articles and news stories she’s read or heard, all touting extremely progressive views. I realize I am being put in my place. I’d watched her do it to the other women all dinner long. This table, it seems, is hers.

9

I have a memory from my time in NY. I am making a delivery, dropping something off for a producer at the backstage door of a Broadway theatre. The doorman is an old man, dressed in shabby, comfortable looking blacks and grays, a cap jaunted on his silvery head. I am a walking rainbow, wearing saturated raspberry tights under a bright tangerine dress, a smart black blazer and knee high leather boots. My younger self loved clothes and the me I have always been loves color. Wow, says the man. He pointedly looks me up and down, makes a face as he scans my body. He looks hard into my face as he says again, Wow. His mouth is a crooked wire. I hand over the package, deliver my message and smile. Wow, he says again, this time his voice is harder, steeling beneath his glare. I continue to smile. I am acutely aware he is trying to communicate something, about my body, my choice of garment. He is seeking a specific reaction. Am I to crumble? To feel ashamed? Should I apologize for wearing too-bright colors? He does not take the package. I continue to smile. I am too polite to challenge him. I am too scared to stop smiling, to stop being the thing I have been taught to be. Wow, he says for the fourth time, again looking me up and down in an exaggerated display. Finally he takes the package, shakes his head and looks away to make a spitting, guttural noise in his throat. I am dismissed. Thank you, I say, my head still high, but inside my heart is a caged bird. I am sweating. When I get home that night, I do not throw away the tights, but it does cross my mind. I never wear them with the tangerine dress again.

10

We wake to their song in the middle of the night. On the dark air, silvered by moonlight, their voices carry, weave themselves into a tangle of sound that spreads through the woods and carries down the river. Coyotes. We lay in bed with wide eyes, listening to their chorus of stories. Have they made a kill? Lost a member of the pack? Are they celebrating or grieving? It was impossible to know but I am charmed. In the morning I search for them and discover in native cultures they are known as the trickster, the wise one willing and able to adapt to the ever-shifting unexpected. They are survivors, able to see opportunities where others might only find misfortune. Most charmingly, they are called song dogs. I fall even deeper in love with them. Song dogs. I want to be a song dog.

11

My husband gives me a gift to say, I am thinking of you. An elegant bookmark of white paper with a colorful octopus floating at the top. Raspberry and tangerine! Splotches of aqua and lime. I love it. I love this tiny, artful octopus. I am certain in a past life I was an octopus. Remarkably Bright Creatures cracked open my heart. I am afraid of water, and yet I know I was once a thing of waves. I imagine floating through an upside down sky of stars in the indigo deep. Perhaps I am afraid in my land form because I know how easily I might be lured, I mean swept, away.

12

What sweeps you away? What makes you break into song? Want to pop bubbly? Dance dangerously in the kitchen in socks? We are so lucky to be here. Even in the mess of everything. Even in loss and grief and terror. I am not sure we will survive what is to come, but our only promise is one of death. I refuse to let my joy be stolen in whole. I have given too much, worked too hard. I want to shine into the world, to add light where dark threatens, to twist the blackness into something obscenely beautiful. You, too, love. You, too.

13

The water is crimson. It is meant for the drain, having steamed cranberries and rainbow chard, blueberries and apple slices for the dogs. But I have an idea. I dip sheets of white crepe paper into the dark water. When I lay them out to dry, the colors settle into a marble of periwinkle and robin blue, splotches of lilac and raspberry. With no template, following only my instincts, I craft a flower.

At the start of this year I decided to theme each essay around the meaning of a flower. I’ve mostly honored the structure, with the twisty deviations of life’s expected unexpected. The Victorians assigned meanings to their flowers, and so I will do the same with this one.

Seeking the in between, pausing, resting in the liminal space between action and reaction. What is needed? How do I want to be? Walking the edge between joy and hurt, pain and pleasure, for life is marbled in both and you cannot indulge in one without accepting the other. The meaning of my flower is Flow, moving like water, understanding that life is beautifully brief, and our task is not to suffer, but to be joyous despite.

Happy New Year.