Little Griefs, Little Joys

July was hell. And August’s heat became suffocating. There’s nothing to do but let the days pass by. Hope the heat passes. You wonder how much time you're wasting just waiting. But you’ve done enough work to try to distract yourself from the heat. There are only so many days you can wear a long-sleeved button-up rolled up, sweating your ass off in apartments with the electricity shut off, talking outside with your clients in the unforgiving sun before you start to burn out.

The grocery store feels monotonous and painful like we are all zombies buying overpriced food, looking at the ingredients, realizing everyone and everything is trying to kill us in the name of efficiency and capitalism and industrialization. It's easy to begin to be depressed when you only have $900 in your bank account. But then a small lady, maybe 4’9” turns to you in the pickle aisle and says, “Excuse me, what are the best hamburger pickles? I dont know anything about pickles.” I point out to her my favorite hamburger pickles, Del Dixie. And somehow, for some reason, that small human interaction turns my day around.

August was too big to comprehend. I didn't expect growing up to be so explosive. I was prepared for gradual changes, not everything exploding at once. I could write it all out here but I’m not sure if that's writing or dumping. I’m not sure what writing is at all anymore. I have looked too far inside the idea of writing to make sense of any of it. I’m in that state of mind again where I think, who cares? Who cares if you’re a Writer or not? You write, you’re a writer. You know if you’re a writer. You know if you’re not. Honestly and truly, we know most of the answers to the questions we ask. But maybe it's the answer we struggle with, not the question.

There’s a laundry list of things that happened this past month. I don’t want to write any of it. I want to forget it all happened, which I am aware is an act of repressing my emotions, because feelings are so hard to process. My mom went to the ER this month because she experienced temporary amnesia. She couldn't remember anything. (Later we discovered she must have fallen and given herself a mild concussion) Taking her to the ER, with her in the backseat repeating the same questions was too familiar of a sight. A few months earlier it was my grandma, her mother, in the back seat asking me the same questions over and over again. She kept apologizing for her lapse in memory. Sorry for their memory loss. That’s what always sticks out to me, how sorry people are that they have forgotten. Later in the month, we went to Tennessee, one of Hayden’s cousins was getting married. While we were up there we visited Hayden's grandma in a memory care facility and saw how much dementia has eaten her mind. Dementia seems to be everywhere. A crumbling of memory, it all slips out of our hands. Who are we, what are we, without memories? Sitting around a bonfire in Tennessee with Hayden’s cousin Benjamin, he tells us he holds his distance from visiting his grandma in the memory care home. He says he's selfish. But it looks more like pain to me. The way we deal with someone's memory slipping, with someone disappearing from our lives is all so different. And maybe sometimes the distance we put in between each other is a signal of how much we love someone. It hurts to watch the ones you love grow old, become different than what they were to you. 

Getting to Tennessee this past month for a wedding was financially stressful. It seemed impossible until we were on the road, which seems like a truth for most things. It was the first time we stayed at Hayden’s grandma's house without her there. Cobwebs and dust and still air, we entered. Everything in its place, I imagined her running around cooking, marking her calendar, taking her calls, watching her show, going to play golf, and making sure everyone was having a good time. I hadn't been there in almost 6 years. I'm a different person now than I was then. The weight of being there felt more rooted. I walked the house slower, looked at all the photos of her 3 children, and imagined all the life and pain and joy that this house held for so many. Life never feels more heavy than walking into your parent's home they grew up in, even in-laws. All the lives shaped here leaked down to Hayden and then spill down to his cousin's kids. 5 generations. The weight of everything trickles down from person to person until there’s no one left to carry the weight.

I watched the documentary Grey Gardens a few weeks ago. I was transfixed. A mother refusing to let go of her home, her mansion after her ex-husband said he would no longer pay for it. A daughter coming home to take care of her mother. Both named Edith. Relatives of Jackie Kennedy. Little Edie, the daughter sacrificed marriage, her career, her passions, and the freedom to make her own life. It was strange to watch, beautiful and devastating. How much we are willing to sacrifice for others. How much we are willing to sacrifice for a home. Raccoons had invaded the home, and rats too no doubt. Their cats piss everywhere, the house quite literally falling apart, and yet little Edie tries to decorate her room with such thoughtful intention. In disarray, we all still wish to make a home. I find it harder and harder to judge how others live. Life is so incredibly nuanced and complex and simultaneously, simple. Love. Connection. To not be alone. That's all any of us want. 

The days have been hard for so many of us, I know. I know we are in a transformative period. A period of aching growing pains, but some days I am holding my breath. I wish I could speed up time to go through this more quickly or to get through it more quickly. I want to squint my eyes and fast forward through the hard times. I have faith in God, the universe, in us, the stars, and the ocean. Sitting on the beach at midnight watching the full moon with Hayden, I think, we are two small beings in this vast world, everything is so much bigger than us. We are in control of very little and that gives me some comfort. 

What’s faith got to do with anything? I think everything. 

I picked up The Heart Aroused by David Whyte, Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in corporate America because I was feeling a split between my soul and work. 

“The soul's ability to experience heaven or joy in the corporate workplace, then, is commensurate with our ability to feel grief. What griefs? Grief in the daily struggle, grief in the neglect of family, grief in the continuing sacrifice of our precious, personal time, all placed on the altar of organization, and all of it never enough. We spend too much time rationalizing or justifying the way we work and too little time experiencing the griefs themselves. The result is that these griefs remain hidden and never open us to our joys. It is as if the two are simply two ends of the same whole. Remove the experience at one end of the scale by curtailing our capacity for grief, and the whole emotional body shrinks into a bland middle, curtailing equally our capacity for joy.” 

—

It was midnight in Tennessee, Hayden, Hannah, Benjamin and I were watching the series The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team. Hayden and Hannah fell asleep while Benjamin and I continued talking. There were questions of legacy and the meaning of life, there are always questions of the meaning of life, of what it all means, of where do we go from here, and what do we do with the knowledge we have. He talked about a theory he read where the universe was one and then became two, and that there's always this constant friction. He left off with a laughter in his question,  “Are we just trying to get back to 1?” “But what is 1?” I recognized the laughter, the acknowledgment of the absurdity of the question, of trying to figure life out, as if we could. I dont remember anymore what theory exactly he was talking about, was it parallel universes? But I keep thinking of that thought, are we just trying to get back to 1? To becoming whole again? 

—

“The alchemists maintained that we can create only in our own image. That is, everything takes form according to the consciousness that shaped it. If our self-image is small and restricted, or cold and inert, then what we produce will most probably be stillborn, like its maker. It is essential, then, to know what is vital and alive inside us and shape our lives in its image… To create the golden moment, we must know where the gold lies in ourselves… We throw the precious metal of our own experience away, exchanging it for the fool’s gold of a superimposed image, an image of what our experience should be rather than what it actually is.”

–

After the wedding in Tennessee, after the ceremony, and after we ate, and after we took photos at the photo booth, Hayden, Hannah, and I went to dance on the dance floor. No one was dancing but a little girl, but as soon as we got on the dancefloor we were in our own little world. Little slices of joy I thought. They can only happen if you let go. If you embrace the fear of whatever it is that is dominating your mind. The movie scenes we all wish our lives were like can happen if you let them. They happened then on that dance floor, as we were all dancing goofily, as Lil Wayne came on the speakers, as Hayden's mom joined us, as we played “add-on”. A singular, pointed moment.

One of Benjamin's sons, Noah, has a habit of saying “Dark! Scary!” instantly as the sun sets. In a place like a farm in Tennesee, the dark is scary. There’s nothing but the stars to guide you. One night as all the cousins were together hitting golf balls and talking as the sun set, I looked up at the sky and saw all the stars. There was infinitely more than what we could see in the city of Houston. I saw a shooting star but it went too fast to tell anyone. Later when I told Hayden he said, “That was your shooting star then.” 

The last day we were in Tennessee we went to go look for the horses on the farm in the morning. We didn’t find them, figured they must be in their barn still. But around 5 PM they came down to say hi. I ran to grab my camera and put on my boots. There are only 3 now, they had a bad year last year and lost 5. The darker horse, Tiki, came right up to us for pets. Staring into her eyes was like we were communicating. There was so much depth, so much soul in her eyes. It felt like I was seeing her whole life in her eyes. 

I haven’t been able to get out of my head, “little griefs, little joys.” A few days after my mom got out of the ER, my siblings and I were all sitting in her bedroom, talking and laughing like we were in grade school again. Grief and joy. Fear and laughter. They seem to always be on the same pendulum swing. We are older now, wiser, with more dirt on our hands, capable of baring the weight of life. Understanding the delicacy of it. Everything seems so important now.

It’s September now. The heat has started to cool off. The energy is turning, the weight is lifting. I lay on the hammock watching the dragonflies overhead. I feel the autumn breeze roll in. Hayden is painting again, making music again. I am shooting again, and writing again. Inspiration comes in with the wind.

“Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.”

Rilke