In the empty spaces between the pale adobe faces
Of buildings, chile ristras drying in bunches in doorways
Lift on the breeze that, on the twisted back of the evening,
Carries an ancient lament across the desert.
After the wedding party, led by a mariachi band
Up a sandstone staircase, falls asleep in white sheets,
The land recalls the rhythms of a thousand forgotten languages
Pressed by weary feet into its surface.
The dry aged hand of the wind with a hundred whistling names (all forgotten) — stops
To remember all the tears it has collected in its palm,
And once a year returns them to those who stop here now,
Strange tongues opening to catch the drops.
I attended Houghton College for my undergraduate education. They are a Christian liberal arts school with a chapel in the center of campus. The school has a policy of compulsory worship-- or at least it did in the mid-1990s when I attended. We were required to attend chapel 3x per week and we had to scan in with our student IDs to prove that we attended. I found the concept of compulsory worship revolting, and during my senior year, continued to attend chapel, but stopped scanning in.
Mid-way through the year, I was called into the office of some college official who dressed me down for my lack of attendance. He made the assumption that I had not attended, without asking me any questions. So I kept my mouth shut, allowed him to persist in his incorrect judgment of my behavior, and accepted my punishment, which consisted of listening to recordings of chapel services and writing notes on them.
It was a liberating experience for me to remain silent in these circumstances. I knew that I was in the right, and that was all that mattered to me. That experience became something of a template for me. Whenever I am faced with judgments on my character or conduct based on something other than actual knowledge, and without being given the opportunity to tell my side of the story before judgments are passed, I simply hold my tongue and allow people to continue on their way. It costs me nothing to receive their wrong judgments-- nothing other than their esteem, which by then I place no value upon. And it seems to give them real enjoyment to pass these judgments. In a way, I enjoy it too. I enjoy my freedom from their view of the world.
You started your days here on earth
Saying that you were Snake.
You shed that name like a discarded skin
And in doing so claimed the namesake.
You spent the pandemic hibernating,
Quietly remaking yourself into
Someone easier to approach,
And your circle of friends has grown.
I still see you curled in a circle,
Swallowing your own tail like a riddle--
Infinity with a beginning, middle, and end
That you are still learning how to bend.
When my first child was born, I spent countless hours during her first months of life simply staring at her sleeping face, amazed at her tiny existence, and the way that every conceivable human emotion would wash over her features. Her angry scowl would split into a wide, open-mouthed grin, followed by a grim look of mystification, and on and on it would go. She felt everything all at once, even before she had experienced anything apart from being wrenched into this world and stared at. I wondered at the wordless thoughts that accompanied these expressions, if they existed at all. She seemed to have entered the world with the whole spectrum of human emotion already latent inside of her, just waiting for life’s experiences to give vent to its various expressions.
Later, in my 30s when I became serious about running, I similarly marveled at the way that my own emotions would vacillate dramatically during every run, from the depths of despair at ever finishing my goal distance, to utter elation that I was doing something difficult but beautiful and my body was equal to the challenge. Those emotions would surface inside of every run, but I started to prefer running up and down giant hills because then, there was an external explanation for the arc of those feelings— running downhill or on flat surfaces was joyous and running uphill was dreadful. I would have had those same emotions without the obvious challenge of the hills, but when I run on flat surfaces, there is no hook to hang my feelings on, and they run amok.
I wonder how much of our modern miseries have to do with narrowing our lives in such a way that we lack external stimuli on which to hang our feelings. We narrow our lives with electronic devices, with overwork, and most recently, with the horrifying isolation that accompanied the pandemic. How much of our mental health is wrapped up in simply finding an experience that will give vent to the feelings that we all must express over the course of our lives? The sorrows, the joys, the trepidation, the mystery— all of these things we need to feel in turns. When our lived experience becomes too limited, nothing is there to elicit our inner dramas and call them out onto the stage of the world.
