Tag: self-discovery

On Wildishness: Brambleberries, Books, and the Blue Path

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes no paths are marked, but we keep finding our way.

Last week:

Outside it is glowing green. The heavy cloud cover is too much for the early morning sun to shine through much, but there is a strange brightness to the world. The sycamore branches hang low, forming an enchanted canopy over the front yard. The lawn, more clover than grass, needs mowing, but I don’t know if the respite from the rain will last long enough. I can see, through this big window, the plants I inherited, and those I lovingly introduced into my own little ecoscape. I can see in my efforts several themes: a disregard for research, for the details of what will thrive where; a passion for the hues and textures I love, the pinks of the cosmos, the fuzzy white surface of angel’s wing leaf; two competing desires – to create order from chaos, and to let things be at least half-wild.

It has rained so continually and with such force in recent days that many people have experienced flooding. I am lucky. For me, only this: the yard is puddled, the dogs’ paws are perpetually muddy, the firepit is full of rainwater, and the pages of my library book are noticeably limp from the humidity.

I look for a place to shelve my heartache. It has no call number, like the library book on the sofa next to me. There’s no order for it, no alpha, by author, though that is an intriguing thought if you follow it.

A Few Days Ago:

The weather has turned blisteringly hot again, and the humidity is ever-present. The AC is still broken, but I have finally scheduled the repair. Sometimes such mundane tasks seem overwhelming.

At times, I feel heaved, in the way that land masses heave in an earthquake. Emotions upend one another, and I list, unbalanced. And I make a list: what I want. I don’t know how to make the next list: how to get there. I do not know how to map the new topography. Each time I find myself alone, unpartnered, the landscape looks different. I am different, changed.

The puppy is eight months old now, and over 62 pounds, and wants to eat constantly. I have 30 minutes to write. I have walked both dogs, separately. I need to begin work soon. I give myself 30 minutes, but the puppy begins to bark at the food cupboard. His empty stomach and growing body will not wait. I think of all the things in me that are growing, that feel snarled and surly, and which also do not want to wait. I feed the dogs. I make sure no one fights over food. The clock ticks.

Last night at dusk I picked the wildish berries growing in the yard. I call them brambleberries, my sister told me they were black caps. The setting sun lit up a giant fluff of cloud till it glowed pink, and I tried to capture it all and save it, this simple moment that offered a spark of joy. I try to collect them, such joyful moments, like the fireflies the puppy chases, like a handful of brambleberries.

My thoughts are everywhere lately, in the past, the present, the future, everywhere at once it feels, as though the hourglass has become a snow globe, and all the seconds are all happening at once. I wait for things to slow, and to settle.

Today:

Today I am making a blueberry crisp. I have walked the dogs. The puppy lunged at every robin and sparrow that he saw. When I woke this morning, I felt as though things were relatively manageable. It is a feeling I don’t have every day. It sometimes doesn’t last through the morning.

I think of how many times in one’s life everything cries out to be reassessed, usually at an ending, before the next beginning. I try the trick of looking at it all from different angles, seeing opportunities to grow, and I wonder, have I grown in the right directions? Maybe it is always the right direction if you can look back and realize what you have learned about yourself, when an offshoot took you down an unexpected path. Maybe.

A Couple of Weeks Ago:

My son and I went for a hike in some local woods where we’d previously had a difficult time navigating. We were determined to be observant, to stay on the path marked in blue on the map at the entrance, the path marked crudely in blue spray paint on trees and markers in the woods. It felt impossible. The trail doubled back on itself multiple times. We’d approach a crossroads, and there would be blue everywhere, in each new direction. At one point we theorized that vandals had spray painted random blue markers to be mischievous, to get people lost.

You never know when the mischievous universe will let you think you’re on the right path. Unless, there is no mischief, and it is all the blue path, and you are always going where you need to, and it isn’t always out of the woods. Though, I do believe there is always some mischief at work in the universe.

Today:

There is no place to shelve anything, none of the difficult feelings. There are no shelves, just piles of books, a wildish, half-ordered forest of them, and we find pathways through. We’ve follow our noses, our guts, or our hearts, and if we’ve learned anything it is that the only way is the way we are going.

On Art, Home, and Haziness

By Catherine DiMercurio

A friend and I recently were writing to one another about why we write. That conversation yielded for me an understanding that why is a question awkwardly affixed to the relationship I have with writing, which is more akin to the relationship I have with my skin than anything else. In a broad sense, it is something I have, something I need, something that protects me.

On a practical level, yes, writing is also something I do. Sometimes it is an act of artistic creation and sometimes it is an involuntary function that happens automatically and silently, the way my brain tells my lungs to breathe. Things are unfolding all the time in my mind and I wish I could somehow capture more of it. Sometimes writing is my only hope for effectively communicating my heart to the world, (or to the more individual and larger universe of me and you).

Sometimes writing is a job and sometimes it is a wish, but it is always skin.

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years, weeks, days, minutes, always, trying to pinpoint such facets of my identity throughout the changing circumstances of my life. This intense scrutiny was kickstarted by my divorce, though I had long been focused on issues of identity in my writing, always trying to figure out if we become more of who we are as we age, or less.

As I enter my first spring in this new place, I sat down recently with my coffee and felt myself settling in, to here, to now, to me. And I thought, maybe I’ve been asking the wrong questions about identity and self-awareness. Maybe the most direct route to understanding who am now is this: what makes me feel at home within my own skin, no matter where I am?

The first thing I thought of was the coffee I was drinking, as I sat on my new-ish IKEA sofa in this still-new-to-me home. I then pictured myself at my boyfriend’s place, still new-ish to him. It is a curious thing: you find yourself in a life where none of the places in which you find yourself are ones in which you have much history. So where is home, then, except housed within us, and created anew, sitting next to this person who seems able to keep making space for you, and you for him. You put out the welcome mats for one another, sweeping them off or airing them out if there is ever difficult weather.

Photo by Nathan J Hilton on Pexels.com

It is a marvelous but strange thing to be aware of your own history-making. To contemplate the ways in which home and history are related, but not in the ways you once thought. I recommend keeping an eye out for it, for the art you are making of self, seemingly out of thin air, or from webby gossamer strands, every day.

As I walked around the yard with the dogs one morning, it smelled like summer. Recent rain on thirsty dirt, a damp promise of heat panting in the air. I thought of drinking camping coffee, sitting with the kids in the morning, outside the tent, feeling cozy. The memories collaged in my brain, out of order, but collective. This too is history and home and self. It remains, clean and bright and clear, even in the aftermath of events that left much of the past feeling sooty and smudged.

It may seem strange to utilize list-making and note-taking as paths to self-discovery. Such a process lacks the romance of the quintessential road trip motif. However, sometimes things don’t work that way. It is less a fun, crazy journey and more paying attention and hard work. Mostly, I crave simplicity. I want to create obvious paths to certain self-knowledge, so that I can quickly run toward what I know and like about myself. So I can gallop toward safety, when I’m feeling anxious, or filled with self-doubt, or self-criticism. It is so easy for the negative to overtake us sometimes. We need to have our escape routes planned. Sometimes you have to sit down with yourself and go through the checklist, the way in elementary school we had to ask our parents what the escape plan was if the house were on fire. You have to tell yourself, when dark thoughts begin to suck you in, that there are the paths back to yourself, that you know the way. It is too easy to get lost in the thick haze and smoke of anxiety, depression, fear, or grief.

I feel as though I’m often vacillating between extremes – between being overly candid or completely withdrawn, between whole-hearted enthusiasm and active detachment. I wonder how people find middle ground. I speculate that there is a place thought of as “normal” and most of us hover around the edges, not seeing each other, and the imaginary normal place is teeming with a healthy population of individuals that can communicate with one another with ease and confidence. But in reality, most of us fumble, we hurt and get hurt, we regroup, we take deep breaths and fall silent. We clear our throats, and our eyes, try to speak and see, and be seen once more. Sometimes we manage to get it right, to find a safe, strong hand in the haze, and so we practice the art of holding on to one another.

Love, Cath