Category: being and becoming

On New Shapes and Exercises in Normalcy

By Catherine DiMercurio

In this state of suspension, we are given conflicting orders. We are told don’t move and keep moving as much as possible. We are playing freeze tag. We are it for a moment, running frantically with purpose, then frozen and waiting once again.

We are told many things, about how we should feel about all this, what we should and should not be doing, how we should and should not react. How can our responses to this “information” overload be anything but mercurial?

We fall back into what is familiar to us as a way of coping. We want to reach out to those who give us comfort, though our access to them may be limited, and they are going through the same thing, so it almost doesn’t seem fair anyway.

Sometimes I am fighting the feeling of shutting down, of retreating inwardly until it’s over. Except that I know that returning to self, from self, is a scary climb out of darkness sometimes and I don’t want to do that anymore or again or ever so I’m really trying, as we all are, each in our own way, to stay present, hopeful, aware and connected.

Sometimes I am feeling immersed in a task or a conversation or a thought and for a moment, or a handful of them, the world is relatively normal, and I breathe deeply and hold it, trying to keep it.

Sometimes I am talking on the phone feeling at once that all is well, and that hovering at the edges of the bubble is the dark strangeness, waiting to seep back in.

ball ball shaped blur bubble
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The most important relationships in our lives are all being pushed and pulled into new directions, new shapes, and each one of them is being explored and navigated differently, carefully, and we are uncertain about what we are getting right and what we are getting wrong.

Sometimes I am very much aware that a specific conservation of energy is happening within me.

When my children were in elementary school, we participated in a fundraiser in which we bought caterpillars that we housed in homemade shelters outfitted with the necessities. A small branch upon which to build a chrysalis. Some sort of food, I don’t remember what. One year we released two butterflies. Another year, one butterfly emerged from its chrysalis with a malformed wing. Sometimes it feels like we are all busy mis-shaping part of ourselves as we try to adapt to what our world has become, all the while, hoping we’ll emerge properly.

If we emerge newly malformed, it will be into a world that’s similarly altered, and we will fit one another, us and the world.

What I am discovering, perhaps just in this moment, that it is maybe best to not call it anything. Maybe it is best to not define it, to just have it be whatever it is on any given day, and to continue. To do the work of the day, whatever it may be, and be done with it.

I have found that I function better when counting on some version of the plans I’d been making. Timelines shift, the contours morph, but still, there is forward, next, soon. Though it all might be tenderly misshapen. Though we were all frozen too long, or it too long, the game of tag prolonged indefinitely. We are not being called in to dinner, or waiting for the streetlights to come on, our cue to go home.

Now there is only home. And it doesn’t mean quite what it used to. It’s not its fault.

We want so badly to not be balancing quite so precariously, on the edge of how things were, and the unknown of how they will be, how we will be. How will we be? But maybe we were always precariously balanced and we just didn’t know it.

There are no fresh insights here, just me poking around at perspectives, trying to find the best one to fit my current state of mind. I think, what is the point of writing this anyway. I think of the little butterfly, awkwardly flying as if she had the hiccups, and the great tenderness I felt toward this not-okay little creature, and I think that maybe that is the perspective that fits me today.

It helps me to think of the constants. Spring was on its way when this all started and is decidedly here now. The forsythia is an effulgent yellow, tight lilac buds are preparing to bloom once the forsythia tires from showing off. The grass is greening with each rainfall. The chubby robins chipped me awake earlier and I’m here, taking it all in. The fresh lush truth of spring. This is hard. We are lonely. We are missing each other. We are counting down the days. I am.

I cannot craft this into something cohesive. It is, if nothing else, an exercise in normalcy. It is the way I interact with ambiguity. I’m exploring the odd new way of things and trying to land on a way of being for right now, and I have great tenderness for our new shapes.

Love, Cath

 

On Tenderness, Torrents, and Tortoises

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we are very close to understanding self and other. And then…

I want to write a tender letter to myself about acceptance, but it’s really to us; we are multiplicities. We are many selves. When I woke this morning, the predicted rain was just beginning. It began as a torrent, rather than slow sprinkles that built to something larger. I thought about how happy could exist, like a bright vanilla cake as large as the sun, right along side the sludgy worry sluicing away near my ankles. And I thought it was because we are many things, all at the same time, we are contained by a cell membrane, unique units all operating within the same space, together and separate. How else can biology and baking and weather all make so much sense to me within the space of a paragraph.

With some sense of delight, I realize this perspective helps me understand other things, other people. With some sense of dread, I realize this perspective helps me understand. There are things I don’t want to understand. But I will try to look at it as beautiful, now that I’m here.

I’ve warmed up some of yesterday’s coffee and sit in front of the heater, the coziest place in the house and my mind drifts to other days, long past, of sitting there, chilled to my core, and I think how ready I am for a new place. I will be looking at two houses today, though it’s a bit too soon, really, but it keeps me motivated to take on the tasks of basement purging and kitchen painting. It’s not the first time in the past few days that I’ve been possessed by an awareness of how far I’ve traveled in the five years since my divorce. Sometimes I’m certain it’s not much, it doesn’t look like much from the outside, but when you think about the journey our hearts take it really is something. It’s like being the tortoise and the hare all at the same time, rushing and plodding all at once.

This year I will be fifty and by the time I hit what our society has deemed a milestone, I will most likely be living in a new house, with two kids in college, and I’ll be settling into a new reality, my many selves exploring a new space. It’s been four years since I got my MFA and I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words since, and only a tiny percentage of them have been read by anyone else, despite my best efforts to publish them. I recently received another really good rejection, at once enormously encouraging, and infinitely demoralizing. Hare yells to Tortoise, come ON, what’s taking you so long. Tortoise to Hare: working on it! We refuse to consider any of it failing; all of us rally behind resiliency and journey.

brass needle through red cloth button
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I think of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, language I’ve only glimpsed but never studied and just now vow to do so, this year, because I cannot get the phrase out of my head today. I think of purpose, and binding self to self, in that gentle way only buttons can do, and I hear myself say you will know me then, and I don’t know what I mean. I wonder if my whole life I’ve been meeting other selves within my selves and all the while taking in others as if each person is some sort of solitary singular unified being. How foolish to have spent so little time considering the cells and suns that make up everyone else. To have not considered all that they understand and don’t want to understand about cell and self. I think sometimes I was getting there, arriving at more complex appreciations, but the world slips away from us sometimes, people do, selves do, and I think one of the saddest and loneliest parts of human existence is that sense of waking from a dream and not being able to remember it.

Sometimes I feel as though I exist as full torrent, that is to say, not in the punishing way of a hard rain, but as if I have come into this moment all at once, rather than gradually, as if I’ve always known how to be all of my selves all at once. Other times I see the gradual gathering, the building drop by drop, history by history, a coming into being that has taken all of my cells centuries. Each version, the torrent and the drop, begs for forgiveness and acceptance. I’m sorry I’m too much. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I do wonder sometimes if I think about Being so much because I don’t know how to do it or because I do, because we all do.

Even now, I feel as though I’m moving away from understanding something important, I’m having that sense of waking from a dream and at the same time relishing the dream that can barely, wait—no, not at all—be remembered, which calls to mind one of the stanzas from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (by Wallace Stevens):

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

For now, I’ll just have to enjoy the just-after moment of the blackbird whistling, and keep trying.

Love, Cath