waking lives
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teaching our children to look alive there, to join by words and…
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet, it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide awake city, in a form that people can use.”
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (with thanks to LTH)
I sit, after this day, a day in which I cried so hard I still have a headache and for what reason? The everything reason. Do you know it? It is the answer I give when I’m asked, “Why are you crying?” and to which I reply,
Because of everything.
I’ll explain.
Today, I cried for the following reasons:
because only one of the six doors to the park was opened
because I bled through my shorts and I didn’t know it until I got home
because I feel sorry for myself that most of my clothes are torn in small places
because I have silk pajamas I got as a gift for my birthday, wore them once
because the next day I got my period
because there’s no way of rearranging this apartment and
because the springs in the old couch are starting to poke through
because I am at a loss
because there is too much to consume, to consider, to curate
because murder, so much murder
because my kids never stop talking and there are no doors in this house
because it’s not fair what happened/happens/is happening/will happen
because I miss my friends, my comrades, my accomplices but we have no reason or occasion to gather and won’t for a long while
because I thought I had mourned this loss, but no, not really, not all the way.
It took me almost two whole days, lots of tears, a few key text messages, to haul up my wealth, to wake up. I found my wealth, finally, in a small gesture, while I was describing a feeling on a Zoom call. The gesture was the slow cracking open of a door.
This is my form. This is a repeat performance. This is, hopefully, a form people can use. I want nothing more than this. To sort and collect and share the feelings I’m reaching into the dark water for, feeling around and hoping to pull out something of use.