The terror of this year was being left behind.
One friend forked like lightning and shot away, all sparks. Another woke up so hungry, she ate an entire forest, one tree at a time. A town fed me childhood memories mingled over a smoking woodfire and then dozed off when I asked for a blessing. All that remained was the path forward.
This year, I planted flowers and walked away. The birds tell me that someone else is tending the garden. The world has many hands to do its work: tying a tomato vine to a pole or giving a pineapple some ash or splitting the lemongrass down its tall heart. I learned that new hands would carry pieces of me to new soil. That I can be asleep without dreaming. That I can dream without seeing a monster. That the bird nesting in my wall is just a bird and the lizard on the tin roof is just a lizard and the paint on my fingers is just paint and all of it can be steeped in a familiar mug and sipped on and from the other side of the valley my friend sets down a tree trunk and waves, and the sun glints off her hunger and I wave back.
This year I stopped translating myself. When I opened my mouth and clouds came out, I took the clouds on a string to the market. A man asked, “All this, from your imagination?” I turned my pockets inside out. Out of my pockets tumbled silence. The best thing about being left behind is that when you wake up, you are still in your own life. •
You may have noticed the turn in this piece. It opens with “The terror of this year was being left behind” and closes with, “The best thing about being left behind is . . .”. I borrowed this turn from Victoria Chang’s poem “With my back to the world, 1997”. It fascinated me that she book-cased her poem in two powerful lines that seem, at first, to be complete opposites.
Maybe it’s counter-intuitive to post a piece evaluating the past year at the end of January, but time (in my experience) rarely obeys the calendar. It’s more common to have a cluster of experiences that bring a new understanding, and that revelation, or shift of events, is what “ends” the season for you. What was the terror of your year? And when you open up that terror and look inside, what best thing do you find?
You’ll have to read Chang’s poem to know her own specific terror, but here’s my favorite line from it: “This year I stopped shaking the rain off umbrellas and nothing bad happened.”
Thank you spending a minute with me and a garden and clouds on a string today! These weekly lyric essays and prose poems are free, thanks to the generosity of paid subscribers. A big thank-you to everyone who has been sharing my posts lately. <3
Victoria Chang entered my creative orbit at the same time as walnut ink, and now the two live together. Here’s an earlier piece inspired by Chang:
Everything That Goes “Bang”
On some days I think trees can grow forever. I think I can close my eyes and the wind will resemble an explanation. On other days, I want to draw a briefcase, stuff everything that goes bang inside it, put the drawing in a bottle, and toss it out to sea. No one tells you that the fastest thing on earth is the future. No one tells you that sadness is so …
It's so freeing, the line: "This year I stopped translating myself." A greater kind of self-trust emerges. It reminds me of Walt Whitman writing "I too am untranslatable" to a hawk in Song of Myself. Sometimes we don't need to make ourselves so visible and palatable. <3
So struck by “This year, I planted flowers and walked away.” As if the act of starting is enough ❤️