Thresholds

Learning oneself is an interesting proposition. So is unlearning oneself.

Today I went to the garden store and bought two bird feeders, the kind with suction cups for the windows since we're on the second floor here. Getting those to "stick" to the glass proved more challenging than I had hoped, and I already had to fish one of them out of some bushes. Hopefully they'll stay put and the birds will soon enough discover them.

During the first months of the pandemic, watching our bird feeders was one of my happiest things. (We took them down after hearing that they might be harming the local songbird population; from what I've read, the danger of contributing to the spread of disease has passed.)

We get up early in the morning – though daylight savings threw a wrench in things and it's been hard to rouse ourselves these past couple of weeks – and when I take Chupie out to pee, the birds are singing to the dawn. I like to stand there for a few minutes, listening. Sometimes, a blush of morning light will be dousing the treetops, but most days, it's still fully dark out when we rise. I listen for how many different calls and songs I can tease out before going back inside for coffee.

I was going to go for a long walk today. I was going to call a friend. I didn't do either of these. Instead, I bought bird feeders and went grocery shopping. I read, then snoozed a little. I walked around the block.

Sometimes, I wonder if I'll ever write another book. I’ve self-published three books, collections of poems and short prose pieces. When I say I wonder if I will ever write another book, what I have in mind is something more like a memoir, a narrative that makes sense of the things I've learned and unlearned, or at least some of them.

There are days when I long to do nothing but write, and others when I think I'd be happy to watch the birds, and still others where I wonder how on earth I didn't become a humanitarian aid worker or refugee resettlement caseworker.

In high school and college, I pictured myself working at the U.N. I imagined becoming a rabbi. My aspirations and visions for myself were big ones, yet my heart led me away from career paths that required climbing and instead towards less definable paths, namely the one we call poetry.

In poetry, I could both find and escape something essential about myself. In poetry, I felt accompanied, seen, understood even. Poetry also gave me a voice to express the inner world that I carried that felt so separate from the world of degrees and jobs and the pressure to perform. I could write and step away from the dogged problem of "how to be in the world," a question to which I always came up short. I felt, as a young adult, that I knew who I was but not how on earth to set that being into motion.

Of course over time, I found out that I had a lot more to learn. That the "me" I knew was still, in many ways, imitating the only life I could imagine. Aspects of it were deeply authentic, in that I always knew I wanted a family and a home, and work that made a positive contribution in some way. Community was important to me, and my first job after grad school gave me my first real taste of being in a role that combined bringing people together, holding space for meaningful conversations, and being a mentor to young adults who were figuring out what role being Jewish played in their lives.

The moments I loved most in that job were the ones where I was connecting deeply with one person or a very small group. What I did not love was fundraising or the politics inherent to working with a board. I was a bit of a lone ranger even as I was also a people person, and I felt at times confused by my own seemingly polar opposite inclinations.

I've spent much of the past two decades working not only to better understand these, but to integrate parts of myself that I had either exiled or felt powerless to. If there's one thing that's been consistent, it's that every time I think maybe I'm "done," life reminds me that we're never done (well, ok, unless you are a bodhisattva or a tzaddik)!

I try to remember to smile at this, even when it is frustrating or hard. It means I am alive, and that I care, and that I have access to skillful guides – all good things. Another thing I’ve learned is that change take time, and the part of me that likes to bang things out sometimes fights this (until she surrenders).

Lastly, I have come to respect the fact that in addition to words, in addition to writing, what I need is silence. Whole days with minimal interactions (usually weekends for me). Time to watch the birds. Time where I am not forcing progress on any front, be it internal or external. As someone who grew up in a household of "do-ers," this still doesn't always come naturally, and yet the impulse is deep and true.

I don't know if I'll ever write another book. I don't know so many things. But I do know that it's a relief when I allow myself a day of quiet, where the hours pass and I don't measure them by how much I've accomplished or fit in. I never was very good at fitting in, after all.

When we give ourselves room to stop responding to who we thought we should be and start listening for who we are, things begin to rumble. They may take time to show themselves or find form, but if you stay with it, stay with yourself, something does happen. The struggle softens. Little things, like the crocuses in March in New England, become a source of simple awe. You see that you were yourself all along, even in the periods where it felt like nothing fit and no one got you.

Words are necessary, and silence is essential. It’s the relationship between the two that becomes a kind of resting place, one that can hold the whole of you.

What I know, a few layers below the familiar territory and topics of this writing, is that there are new things for me to begin writing into and about, things that feel less "safe" yet are no doubt the frontier that awaits me.

How long that will take or what it will lead to, I can't say. But that I'm nearing that threshold, that I can see.