PSST! Rantings, Musings, & "Not Your Mama's" Platitudes

 Nearly nine and still the sun's not slunk into its nightly digs. The burnt-meat smell of midweek cookouts and wet grass hangs in the air like loose familiar summer garb. Standing by the magnolia tree, I think if I were to live as long as she did, I'd have  eleven more years. And if I were to live as long as him, I'd have forty-nine. As long as him, I'd be dead already. As long as her, this  would be my final year. There's a strange contentment to this countdown, a nodding to this time, where I get to stand under the waxy leaves of the ancient genus, a tree that appeared before even the bees, and watch as fireflies land on the tough tepals until each broad flower glows like a torchlit mausoleum. They call the beetle's conspicuous bioluminescence "a cold light," but why then do I still feel so much fire?

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop. Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you. Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean. Give it back with gratitude. If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars' ears  and back. 

The English word most warranting removal from our language is UNBEARABLE; all I see is people keeping on. Scrubbing the kitchen, she told me she had three hearts. One was charged with delivering blood throughout the dim aquarium of her body, one was dead along with her mother, and one persisted to grieve on behalf of the world.

Do not try to serve the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is yours alone to sing falls into your open cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to the world so worthy of rescue.

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a  bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but  they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Sometimes the push is just enough to send what’s left of us to the ground. Sometimes there is no answer. Sometimes we endure through the worst and never recover. Sometimes getting out of bed is the accomplishment. Sometimes we must let go of what we thought was good. Sometimes we forget what is good. Sometimes we are left standing, hands empty, with a great hole in our chest. Sometimes that hole remains. Sometimes we walk with that hole until the end. Sometimes relief comes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we must sit alone and bear it all. Sometimes the weather will be kind enough to match our mood. Sometimes the rain will fall and fall and fall. 

"And the speaking will get easier and easier . . . And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you . . . And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking."

"This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss."

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."

"Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell."

"...How do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances."

Maybe it will never be warm again. Maybe the playground fortune-tellers were wrong & I will not be married with 5 kids, 7 dogs— maybe no one will even kiss me again, not how I want to be kissed, at least, close-crushed together like my lips are the last bite of chocolate torte. Maybe I will keep weighing myself to know whether I'm happy or sad. Maybe every unsent letter, bloody hangnail, toothache, & swallowed scream haunts my body. Bitter ghosts. Maybe this grayscale life is all I get: strip malls, shards of dry toast, slushy roads. Maybe I am still the little girl who loathes sled-riding, who stares up from the valley at the steep, snowy hill dotted with happier children, & can only wonder It's all so heavy. What's the point?

The roofing company who replaced my roof last fall. The insurance company. The person who offered to replace a necessary unit in my home. The man who forced himself back into my life, claimed a changed outlook, then revealed the opposite with his actions. Family who accepted pleasantries and rejected conflict. The pharmacy who filled the prescription incorrectly. The doctor’s office who instructed me to call the pharmacy, and round we go. The years of pharmacy practice that are now meaningless. There is no one I can call for anything. I have no support. 

I wrote the name of the one I loved On the wind.  I wrote the name of the one I loved On the water.  But the wind is a bad listener, The water does not remember names. 

I dreamed I went on a date with a widower at a restaurant in a Chicago mall. There were two small blonde girls there who needed attention. I kept trying to get them to sit still but they wouldn’t oblige. I got something in my eye and needed to find some contact solution, so I walked out of the mall and down a block to the corner traffic light. People were everywhere and it was dark. A woman selling artwork told me she had some contact solution. I noticed her hands were filthy and I told her thank you anyway, but that I needed to get back to my date. She said if I would let her, she would be the best date I ever had. I walked back into the mall the same way I came but found myself utterly lost. I walked for what seemed like ages. I finally asked a woman at a department store if they had directions to the restaurant. They laughed at my southern accent and one of the women was on the phone with her boyfriend telling him everything that was happening. I said forget it, I’ll find it myself,...

Rest will never feel urgent to those who don't understand the violence of exhaustion. In a world that uses the body as currency, rest is a sacred defiance. A  reminder that  we will not be owned .

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

For to wish to forget how much you  loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the  slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a  habitat of your heart.

I can, with one eye squinted,      take it all as a blessing.

I'm not going to cry all the time nor shall I laugh all the time, I don't prefer one "strain" to another. I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie, not just a sleeper, but also the big, overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says, "That's  not like Frank!", all to the good! I  don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,  often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— you can't plan on the heart, but  the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

I am not at the center of anything. Seen at a distance I am hardly seen. Excruciating, how  here i am, how little  it means. I use my mouth to make sounds which approximate my innermost thoughts but often bungle it. I use my eyes when I need to  be understood. Sometimes I tell the truth but only when I think I"ll be valued for being interesting instead of good. I marvel at what I call my life—ambulances, sparrows, clouds passing definitively by—amazed that it doesn't  know it's mine at all, the minor characters don't look up, the narrative sags, and I  each moment wondering if this is when the real story starts.

I know this happiness is provisional:                the looming presences—                great suffering, great fear—                withdraw only                into peripheral vision: but ineluctable this shimmering of wind in the blue leaves: this flood of stillness widening the lake of sky: this need to dance, this need to kneel:                              this mystery:

How wonderful I can pick berries in the woods I thought there were no woods or berries. How wonderful I can stretch out in the shadow of a tree I thought trees no longer gave shade. How wonderful I am with you my heart is beating fast I thought human beings had no heart.

Before my grandfather died, I asked him what sort              of horse he had growing up. He said, Just a horse. My horse , with such a tenderness it              rubbed the bones in the ribs all wrong. I have always been too sensitive, a weeper              from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

Who will I be when I wake after enduring?

REGARDING KIM ADDONIZIO'S POEM "SOLACE"  (regarding: Art / sometimes can enter / through a sliver.) As in: sometimes we are not calmed or soothed or moved by what is offered to us—the seemingly-trite line shared right in the midst of grief—but instead we are moved by what we are surprised by, if only we allow ourselves just the smallest sliver of opportunity to be surprised. That  sliver  that Addonizio mentions—it's the old note a friend once left me that I keep tucked into the smallest pocket of my biggest jacket. It's a butterfly on a bench when you think of your late grandmother as a butterfly. It's the cardinal on the balcony's railing. The sun's fire-shimmer on the water. It's a murmuration of birds; it's a toddler in mismatching shoes. It's the sliver in ourselves that we keep open, even when we are more than halfway to being gone. It's not hope, I don't think. But it's not full-blown despair. It's remembering, whethe...

was no consolation to the woman whose husband was strung out on      opioids. Gone to a better place : useless and       suspect intel for the couple at their daughter's       funeral though there are better places to be than a freezing church in February,      standing before a casket with a princess motif. Some moments can't be eased and it's no good offering cliches like       stale meat to a tiger with a taste for human      suffering. When I hear the word  miracle  I want      to throw up on a platter of deviled eggs.  Everything      happens for a reason : more good tidings      someone will try to trepan your skull to insert. When       fire inhales your house, you don't care what      the haiku says about seeing the rising moon. You      want an avalanche to bury you....

- for Terrance Hayes Once when my coat was too thin, and one torn pocket was all I had left of  a great love, I found a blue canto that calmed me. A pine tree was in it, and crows. In my head: one ant after another, carrying its burden. Art sometimes can enter through a sliver. Give it a broken fence, it will trellis over. Once, when no one was near, a split tree calmed me,  and a crow's cry tore the air, and my ear found an oar, and I rowed.

If you subtract the minor losses, you can return to your childhood too: the blackboard chalked with crosses, the math teacher's toe ring. You can be the black boy not even the buck- toothed girls took a liking to: this match box, these bones in their funk machine, this thumb worn smooth as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump. Thump. Everything I hold takes root. I remember what the world was like before I heard the tide humping the shore smooth, and the lyrics asking:  How long has your door been closed?  I remember a garter belt wrung like a snake around a thigh in the shadows of a wedding gown before it was flung out into the bluest part of the night.  Suppose you were nothing but a song in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to     wipe sweat from the brow of a righteous woman, but all you owned was a dirty rag? That's     why the blues will never go out of fashion: their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot     octaves of consequence; that's ...

I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon  and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of hills, moving to a flat, tuneless landscape. And every night I give my body up limb by limb, working upwards across bone, towards the heart. But morning comes with small reprieves of coffee and birdsong. A tree outside the window which was simply shadow moments ago takes back its branches twig by leafy twig. And as I take my body back the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap as if to make amends.

Today I slept in and still felt horrible. I was overcome by exhaustion. I felt groggy and heavy and irritable. Everything hurt. I drank water and some coffee and waited until noon to eat (I started intermittent fasting again about a week and a half ago—not sure if it's the best move, but I wanted to try it temporarily to see how I feel). I ate horribly at noon—a bunch of carbs, basically zero protein, limited nutrients. As you can predict, it did not help my situation. I ended up taking an afternoon nap then went to the grocery store to get some food (we were out of everything). I came back and made some pasta salad with macaroni noodles, celery, cucumber, bell pepper, pickles, mayo & olive oil, salt, pepper, adobo, garlic and grilled two chicken breasts cut in half lengthwise on the George Foreman grill. It was lovely and I feel so much better now. I also drank a protein shake after my nap, which I think helped balance things out (I had bought some protein shakes awhile ago an...

Summer days, I lazed in the tall grass and watched buzzards float overhead, wondering whose carcass they'd pick clean next. I listened to cicadas sing, pulled their hollow shells from the bark of hickory trees. I built hay forts, and once, stole the burger out of Bud's lunch sack, replaced it with a cowpie (this was the day after he gave me a fat mouth). And I got more whuppings than I could count. After a while I didn't feel a sting. I learned not to look my father in the eye. Not to beg. Not to cry. Before he even asked, I said, "Nope, I didn't do it. I wasn't playing in the hayloft. I didn't touch Bud's burger. I would never ever steal a lollipop from the candy jar," even if a chewed stick was hanging from my mouth. I said, "Penny Sue, gave it to me." Or "my swim teacher, Miss Patsy, said it was mine—for swimming the butterfly." "Is that why I saw you climbing on the stool, fishing in my sweets jar?" he asked. ...

He is watching the music with his eyes closed. Hearing the piano like a man moving through the woods thinking by feeling. The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below, step by step. The music hurrying sometimes, but always returning to quiet, like the man  remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us, mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure  in the loss. In the yearning. The pain going this way and that. Never again. Never bodied again. Again the never. Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving. A humming beauty in the silence. The having been. Having had. And the man knowing all of him will come to the end.

And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.  Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life.  You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

What Does It Mean to Really, Truly Rest? What ‘counts’ as resting, and when are we simply swathing toxic productivity in soft pants and a robe?  By  December 22, 2022 Amrita Marino This article is part of   SELF’s Rest Week , an editorial package dedicated to doing less. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that taking care of yourself, physically and emotionally, is impossible without   genuine downtime .  With that in mind, we’ll be publishing articles up until the new year to help you make a habit of taking breaks, chilling out, and slowing down. (And we’re taking our own advice: The  SELF  staff will be OOO during this time!) We hope to inspire you to take it easy and get some rest, whatever that looks like for you. I confess that I didn’t give the topic of rest much thought prior to getting COVID-19  in January 2021 , which was the first time in my life that rest was “prescribed” to me. After my positive PCR test, I dutifully g...