lean times II
on being alive and looking for love
probably there’s a way to spend a beautiful family hour and not think of families pulled from each other, mothers and fathers and children wrenched from their earthly hours, but its a way i haven’t learned.
probably there’s also a way to spend an hour of life without all the tiny beautiful everythings filling my heart to bursting. i haven’t learned that either.
— me, two-ish years ago, a little exasperated with my heart and its stubborn insistence on feeling.
Having grown two years older — and maybe particularly having grown through these two years — I am still exhausted by all this feeling, but now have (almost) no desire to live any other way.
Because holding the truth of this world in both hands is the task of being fully alive (it is also, in some traditions, the mark of enlightenment. So let’s give ourselves grace when we fall short). Avoiding feeling — avoiding knowing, avoiding aging, avoiding conflict or avoiding connection, avoiding life or avoiding death — is just as much a mark of our humanity as feeling is. But let’s not abandon this task. It is vital in this teetering moment that we remember our whole humanity, our aliveness.
//
Late at night when I’m out walking the dog, there is a couple I often pass on the street corner. They are young, probably students from the university at the end of our street. It’s been almost two years now since the first time I noticed them, when the space between them was so loud it sang me a poem (my favorite of the four I’ve now scribbled down when I bring the dog inside). I like running into them, following their arc through these briefest vignettes. It’s like a really quiet, subtle soap opera that only I would have the patience to watch.
i passed them at the corner again, the two who lean, sometimes one toward the other, sometimes coolly away. he says "it’s hard to leave you," she studies his face. does he mean i want to stay, or you’ll be with me regardless; i can’t seem to leave the thought of you behind i turn my head to see what she sees, but he has turned too. she rolls back on a heel, trusts the doorway to hold her again.
//
The world is on fire and I keep raging about it and writing silly little poems and sticking out my tongue at little children on the train to make them giggle and weeping at my desk and sighing over trees dancing in the breeze because these things keep me alive.
There’s a clip from Mr. Rogers that resurfaces every so often, from the days after 9/11. He advises the children in all of us that when there are scary things on the news we should “look for the helpers.” There really are a lot of helpers. I do look for them, and it really does help... And then, I look for the lovers. The ones who hold each other close, and the ones whose desire to do so pulses so brightly between them I think it must be visible from space.
I look for them because I love love. And also because love is such a strong reminder, such good practice — it’s maybe the most beautiful-terrible truth of all. And it keeps us alive.
sending love from here. be good to yourselves. look out for each other. keep at it.
💚//mischa