Category: gratitude

impermanence

I fell asleep one night in the middle of reading a paragraph I didn’t want to let go of. I wrote down mono no aware, so that I’d remember it the next day. The Japanese phrase (an empathy towards the inevitable passing of all things), reminds us to maintain awareness of impermanence: the first rule of life is that nothing lasts forever. The power of spring and autumn lies in their transience. I’ve been writing letters to my body, thanking it for being my home. Life isn’t easy on the body, but here it is still, steadfast. Still providing me a home. Knees are amazing.

***

We plan to meet at the farmer’s market. It’ll be… pretty early, he tries to warn me. I am relieved when I reach the top of the stairs coming out of the subway station: blue skies.

He teaches me about selecting oyster mushrooms, gives me leaves of sweet spinach to taste even as I glance at the vendor, wondering if it’s okay to just walk around tasting things.

“Don’t worry so much. Just put it in your mouth,” his eyes crinkle knowingly. Even in my thirties, I still haven’t gotten over double entendres. I vow that I never will. Apples, potatoes — Yukon gold. He balances the sourdough on the top of my head, and I laugh. It’s just warm enough that I don’t mind being outside, but still cold enough for him to ask me if I want apple cider. Of course I want apple cider.

When he chops vegetables, it sounds like that time he improvised on the djembe. I tell him I’m in a meeting, but I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he slices through the apple and tastes it. The Q train rumbles underneath us so that it feels like we’re suspended in the sky or in a secret cellar underground; one of the two. I write scattered notes about it. I don’t want to forget.

Some things that I tasted, I forget. I can’t remember the name of the apple, and I have never been able to find the same kind since. But other things I tasted, I can’t forget if I tried.

After we slather homemade jam on the sourdough and eat all the apple mash, his brown eyes grow soft. We’re sort of dancing around a subject, and to pass the time he talks about how much he admires the work I’ve done.

“What about you? Look what you can do with an apple.” I put more jam in my mouth.

“Well. It’s just food,” he says, his tone bordering on something between discontent and hunger.

For the sake of avoiding other topics, we debate the importance of technology versus food for a while, and he gets up to give me a cookbook from his shelf. His hand is tracing circles on my hand, and I close my eyes. I take the stance that a chef would be more coveted than a technical project manager in the event of an apocalypse, but in the end there is a larger point I am making about the importance of food.

“Mono no aware,” I mutter at some point.

“What?” he asks.

“It’s nothing, I’ll tell you later.”

Ferran Adrià said, “Painting, music, movies, sculpture, theater, everything — we can survive without it. You have to eat, or else you die. Food is the only obligatory emotion.”

***

Poetry books are stacked across my desk because I’m recording poems for friends. This evening I recorded and sent this one to M., who requested something about reclaiming power. It’s by Ada Limón.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

***

That aphorism they say about April showers: now that I live somewhere with seasons, I can finally confirm that it’s true. The blooms fall all around me whenever I walk in the rain. I am already contemplating this year’s roaming battles: both emotional and physical. I am contemplating last year’s abundance, the tenderness, the growth from the tender places, the stagnancy, the struggle. The clouds that passed overhead and then cleared up. It’s not organized, it’s never been. I tidy and tidy, like Marie Kondo tells me to, but somehow it still feels so messy. How do I embrace all this uncertainty? Is it ok to be so affected? Are havens meant to be temporary? Aren’t our bodies, also? I’m lazy on the grass, staring up at the blossoming trees. The light from the sunset spreads so quickly, and leaves so steadfastly. C. writes, “Bad things, like all things, are just a type of light.” Well, then. I’ll take it, with open palms. I’ll take it all.

harvey

My mother will tell me recipes over the phone like: put the rice in 4 times as much water as normal. Put the yams in. Boil, then simmer for hours. I never know how much, or when, or whether or not to peel the yams. Do you halve them, quarter them, dice them. How many hours do you mean by hours. Do I add salt or what.

Maybe this is why I am constantly searching for a more exact recipe in life. I won’t find it; I already know this. But still I sit erect from moment to moment like a strange animal: wide-eyed, expectant, pawing at the darkness.

I remember growing up in Westbury where the streets flood whenever there is a storm. The water would creep into the mufflers, and our cars would cough and choke and stop. We would crawl out of the windows and wade home through brown, sludgey sidewalk rivers. My grandmother carried me on her shoulders once. We’d feel safe once we arrived in the yellow house, the rain sliding down the bay windows. There would be leaves and branches and dirt sticking to us, but we took for granted that the water would never make it in.

Today I imagine the hurricane rains pouring into the windows of the house I grew up in, the windows of the houses my friends grew up in. What recipe asks for this much water? Did some god receive vague, relative instructions for making something?

My mother is at the house alone, like she has been for most of the past decade since we all left for school. My father, insisting to be at the office like he has for most of the past three decades since I’ve been alive, even as unprecedented tornadoes attempt pirouettes in Texan backyards.

I suppose there isn’t an exact recipe to surviving, much less living. But it’s times like these that it doesn’t matter whether you halve or quarter the yams. Salt or no salt. Friends from all around the world have messaged me, asked about how we are doing. Friends with boats have posted open calls to anyone needing rescue. Friends with dry homes and water supplies and board games have publicly invited opened their doors and hearts to whomever needs shelter.

There is no power, but there are candles. We paw at the darkness, together, finding our way.

a birthday post: If not now, when?

I often forget my age. People still indicate their surprise at it, tell me I look “so young.” Which I don’t mind, I hope they will always say that. The edges of my eyes have deeper creases now, but I am happy that they have been carved by the ridges of joy. I still feel young, I still run into the water and leap across puddles when wearing rain boots. The main thing is that I fight harder to get to a place where fear isn’t so large anymore.

Hope is larger.

****

I love the summer: the never-ending daylight, the it’s-too-hot-not-to-eat-ice-cream weather, everything in the middle of bloom.

This is how I feel about my age now. The middle of bloom, and filled with the sort of hope balanced and made wise by the clumsiness of past seasons. It will be a strange, beautiful decade. I am approaching a time when it’s very possible that the life behind me is as much as the life I have ahead of me. I’m more aware of mortality: my family’s and mine.

I’ve arrived at more crossroads than I care to count. This has been a groundbreaking year filled with change and uncertainty. In some ways, I have never felt more grown-up and ready. In others, I have never felt like such a novice.

I keep a list of ongoing resolutions on the last page of my notebook. I don’t make new ones for my birthday, but the one thing I’ll say for this year is: spend time on love. Say it out loud and more often before the day you won’t have a chance to.

As we get older, the number of trials that love puts us through increases. I stumble a lot in finding patience, and I dwell on the past. Forgiveness is difficult, vulnerability sometimes even more so; yet love asks you for both. The awkwardness and tears and stiff moments during which silence hangs in the air like a brick wall: they will all be worth it. No condition lasts forever: the friction we face, the disease that a loved one may survive or not, the agility of our bodies, the argument we initiate, the exhilaration of novelty, this life, this body, this heart, this youth. What will you hope to be (for your loved ones, for yourself) on the other side of it all? Dear Forgiveness, if not now, when?

In the past, I have often let my fear get in the way of love. Not sure who wrote it, but this note captures it well.

“Very often the things we fear most are not only bearable, but transformative.

We will all, many times over, have to reconcile the life we planned with the life we’ve got. And usually the life we’ve got is better.”

My life at 32 is so different from what I planned it to be, but I would not exchange it. I’m taking the leap, I’m all in.

***