On taking a fresh look, pushing aside a few layers, and turning the earth
Dear Sarah,
Hello! I hope you have traveled safely and I am looking forward to seeing you soon!
This week I’ve been thinking about your letter and the process of crystallizing your stream of consciousness in our weekly letters. I was thinking about how when we speak (the you-and-me we, and also the general-people we), most of the time the exact specifics of what was said don’t lodge in our memories, but rather we retain the aura of the conversation, and/or our response to each others’ words, and/or a few specific nuggets that hit the ear just so, and find a clean path into the brain. But when we put it down in writing — then it becomes a kind of document, documentation — even now as I’m handwriting this I am also going to type it up and then it will be different, searchable, a record of something, a permanent (relatively so!) mark of my thoughts.
This week I’ve been thinking about moving, and getting settled and started in a new place. I’ve been thinking about all the ways in which we are finely tuned systems, with ways of being, and how we are also always calibrating and recalibrating in response to our environments. The spaces we inhabit change us, the people we surround ourselves with cause us to dial up, perk up, speak up, or fall back, fade out, tune out, cover up. All those moments become part of us, and then occasionally it is nice to take a moment to look at all the pieces and say, Which pieces are the real me, and which were kind of stuck to me with a time-and-space-specific glue? Which pieces fall away when you give the thing a shake? I’m thinking about how my old problems look a little different in a different time zone, different light from different windows, tucked away in differently sized rooms.
I was also reminded for some reason of the lawn outside the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, which I used to run past on a regular basis. There are all these lovely designed flower beds with beautifully contrasting colors and types of plants, tall spindly ones and shorter clusters of things. And it seemed odd but they were very regularly changing up the whole lay of the land — the beds one morning would just be these symmetrical dark plots, empty but rich-looking, freshly turned, waiting for some new amazing splash of color. It seemed like they were always changing. I suppose it is the nature of flower beds to show their age, they can’t last and last, and then we all move on to something new — new patterns, new views, new layers, literally a fresh start. I’m feeling a bit like a fresh flower bed these days, just figuring out which plants to set where, how to lay out my patterns, which things to plant as annuals, which as new perennials, and which to set for perhaps just a few weeks or months. And even though we’re heading into winter — my first full winter in almost fifteen years — it feels like a lush kind of time. Planting many seeds of what is to come, and seeing what may pop up over time! Maybe I’ll even see the results of seeds I planted years ago. I’m not a gardener but I can appreciate the seed metaphor, because it is also hardly a metaphor at all, it is just the way of things. Now I am splashing a little water on this third week of something we’ve planted together! See you soon, friend!
:) Eva
Dear Eva,
“I find that it can be a relief to be inconsequential,” you wrote last week. I so relate. There is something soothing to the notion that I am objectively insignificant. It connects me to the wider world, melds me down into the messy pot of humankind. Anything I am grappling with, anything I have experienced or will endure — all of it is a tiny drop in an unimaginably large bucket, which of course, takes the pressure off.
I wonder, though, can it also become a cop-out? Resignation feels so easy to slip into, and it feels like it has a way of wiping away obligations and worries. I know that is not what you are saying. You write about how important it is to find meaning and purpose in all moments, knowing that they cumulatively have value. But for me, I worry that feeling resigned to my own inconsequence might become an excuse for inaction and selfishness.
Back to my new religion of complementarianism, the reality is again that both things can and must be true. Like you said, be resigned and be active. Understand where we sit in the world and where we sit in our own worlds. Zoom out and then zoom back in. Repeat.
I am continually amazed at how complicated it is to just be a human, even after nearly 39 years of doing it and having a hugely disproportionate dose of luck and privilege along the way. Even in our own little lives though, I think about how many layers there are, all wrapping around our individual selves on all sides each day. There are people who need and love us. There are tiny choices, like what and when to eat for breakfast, and big picture questions, like how best to spend our days. There are contradictions to wrestle with, like the fact that you can love someone and need space from them, or the fact that we must find meaning in our lives that are objectively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Add on top of all this, we try to keep learning new things about the world: current events, history, science, finance, art, literature, more.
I guess it’s no wonder I sometimes feel a little like I’m being enveloped. I’ve been feeling that way lately, like I need a pause on all new inputs before I can make sense of how best to move around in this life again. At this moment, I’m sitting at an airport in Philadelphia, this letter my last mental commitment for five whole days. I feel a tad guilty for needing and taking this space from my real life, particularly my children. But life is complicated, goddammit, and none of it matters anyway! :) So Bill and I will take these few days to walk the hills, eat pastries and seafood, drink wine, and push away some of the layers on our lives to make sure we can still see where we are headed.
Yours,
Sarah