![]() (A recent publication online if you haven’t seen it yet!) And I have read more than I have in ages, devouring books in huge bites. My only goal this summer is to rewrite what joy feels like, watch what creativity can do for me when I let it move, to erase the numbness that has been sitting on my chest like a boulder for a year, reset my nervous system and let something new be born. I think what is weird and scary (and also amazing and rich with potential) about this moment of post-pandemic transition we are in is that we all know we will emerge on the other side as something different, but we don’t know what that will be. I have been changing all of the little things to bring something new to the page, but what if it’s something big that needs to be scraped clean and rewritten? We are so quick to move all the little pieces around and always so scared to change the bolsters of our lives, scared of the earthquakes that inevitably follow. I rearranged furniture, bought some new houseplants, put fresh combinations of my own clothes together, took a different route to a new grocery store, wore a different perfume. I haven’t written a line here since November, but know that I have spent the last few months writing and rewriting, scraping clean what doesn’t feel right, trying to find a glimmer. Scraping clean what doesn’t work and rewriting again. Scratching, rewriting, scratching, rewriting. I imagine a writer with words in his head waiting to be written somewhere, holding the tight animal skin in his hands with a story already there, then scraping clean the soft page to make new lines. The one where we can see the new work and also feel the traces of something else underneath, barely legible, barely seen. The palimpsest would be the manuscript left behind. In the fifth or sixth century when paper was a rare commodity, writers would scrape clean a page to make space for new writing. I ran across a description the other day of a word I hadn’t thought of in ages. Look for the bass note in everything, and know it’s there, under the surface where I can feel it in my belly. Let my nervous system settle again so that I hear a symphony or a harmonized chorus instead of a high-pitched buzz. And some boring things, too, like drinking loads of water and getting eight hours of sleep. See my closest friends in real life, not just strings of text. Write messy lines in my journal every morning in a quiet house. Water the flowers and watch them grow taller everyday. Then come home to read in my shaded hammock until I don’t even know what time it is or where I am. ![]() And when the kids are gone, hiking alone so early that I pass only three others on my way to the summit. Read more than I’ve read in years, the way I used to read, devouring books like candy. Walk miles with my kids on the neighborhood nature trail. It goes something like this: Delete all social media from my phone. I have made my own recipe for a post-pandemic rebirth, and I’m just hoping it works. And finally a pause and a long look in the mirror to find that I’m half dead. My last two years: a major job change in fall of 2019, a very sick kid for the first four months of 2020, Covid explosion, Covid worries, then overcoming Covid itself as I watched last year pass into another one with a thermometer and a pulse oximeter, a long and dark few months of winter when it was hard to tell up from down, and in any given moment, I couldn’t even articulate how I was feeling, then I turned 40 on a Tuesday. But finally, here I am, 17 days before the summer solstice, on my couch writing this line, listening to rain fall outside with an open window and a breeze in the curtains. We have all been in the belly of the whale, and the timing of our emergence is different for everyone. Like all of us, I was swallowed whole by this last year or two, then spit back up in a new form, not totally sure what shape it will take. ![]() I have come to this space a few times and not known what to write.
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