ultimate frisbee

i recently went to Walden Pond, in Concord, MA. after reading on my quilt for an hour, i swam into the center of the very big pond. i went out further than i meant to, and stayed  there for a long time, treading water and shining my face towards the sun’s. as i was treading, i spun myself around and around, and looked at the treeline and at the edges of the water. i thought about how far away i was from anything that could hold me up, and about how apt a metaphor that is for the way we feel in any hard season.

i was just starting towards the shore, when a guy about my age swam up to my same spot in the very middle of the pond. i hadn’t seen or heard him approach, but when i smiled at him, he said isn’t it a beautiful day and i said man, i was just thinking the same thing, and then, without another word, he tossed me a white frisbee. i picked it off the surface of the water and gently sent it back in his direction. i’m certain neither of us could touch our feet to the bottom, but we glided it back and forth a number of times, both of us treading, both of us smiling. and there, in the middle of all that water around, was a little piece of something to hold me up.  

the part where we let go

several years ago, our family spent the summer in Ireland. we rented a farmhouse one mile from the beach and one mile from the mountains. all summer long, i collected smooth rocks in purples, greys, browns and whites; they were equal parts ocean and mountain—and their surfaces were made even smoother by my intentions to bring them home with me. on our very last day there, i packed my backpack full of my rocks—no books, no portable CD player, no change of clothes for the plane—just my rocks. when my Dad lifted the bag, he pressed me to take them back to the ocean, and after some argument, i took my backpack down and pitched them, one by one, back to the earth.

our family gathered around a big hole in the ground this week to bury my aunt Beverly, who died unexpectedly while on vacation with my uncle and their friends. at the cemetery, we made a circle around her empty body, which was stretched across the empty hole, and stood there as witnesses to the very beautiful life she lived. we let her go there, and spit our prayers into the turned up dirt. it’s not easy to let go of someone young, someone with so much life left in her.

the day after her funeral, i visited some friends in Kentucky; our time together was a balmy salve for a broken heart. after sharing dinner and conversations, we took a walk through their neighborhood and found an old sycamore tree with a wide trunk. scattered around its base were pieces of its own bark—curled and rolled and pocked with age spots and small holes. i imagine the tree bark buckling in the heat, curling away from the new layer below it, and eventually peeling itself off. it wept itself clean of what was dying, or already dead. the felled bark laid on the ground around the tree like so much food to feed the roots below.

how do we learn to let go of something that’s gone already? having lost his only sister, i’m watching my father let himself cry his heavy tears. having lost her only daughter, i’m watching my grandmother give her faithful praises to God. standing beneath the old sycamore, i’m learning how to let what’s already going, be gone. the open mouth of the earth swallows up our losses—sometimes before we are ready to lose them or toss them back—and we learn hard lessons, all along the way.

shedding one thing gives way to a new thing, and in our loss, we have to believe the newness will be beautiful. but that’s hard to remember when the smooth stones you didn’t get to keep are still the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. but the one who is already gone from us falls away and nourishes the life in us that’s still left to grow. and we grow and our faith grows, and we spit out our prayers of thanks when we realize how well we are fed by all we’ve lost.

walk the world with a skin so thin

i recently told some friends in New York i thought it was the most magical thing that we could put an ear into a big shell’s opening and hear the ocean. they laughed, looked at each other and told me it was not the sound of the ocean inside the shell, but the sound of my own blood pumping through my veins. it was several minutes before i believed them, and that was only after sitting back into their couch, putting my ear into an empty coffee mug, and hearing, of all things, the ocean.

this morning i found a small door on the beach—thin and translucent—the kind that serves to wall up a conch inside of its shell. in its glassy surface, i could see evidence that the shell door grew as the animal living behind it grew. amazing that a big, wet muscle of an animal can live with only a delicate veneer of protection from the salty, rocking world around it.

some of us still believe that an empty shell has a pumping heart inside of it that sounds like an ocean, and we wear skin that’s thin for believing in old, natural magic—skin that’s etched with the residue that feeling deeply leaves all across our outsides. i once wore a capital letter S out to a bar in Manhattan—scribbled on a scrap of paper and taped to my chest—an S for sensitive, as in “please be gentle with me tonight, i’m feeling very sensitive.”

we are permeable, penetrable and wide open to believing in the saltiest stuff of the world. and when it hurts to live like that, we wonder if we’ve shown ourselves too much or let too much past our thin veneer of a door. i once asked my youth group why they cared so much about their Youth Sunday worship service to work as hard as they were working, and one of them answered, saying, “it’s just the way our hearts are.” yes.

when i put my ear to the opening of where i come from, i can hear my mom and dad, and they sound like the widest ocean—still in a love with each other that has been watered by their commitment to stay open, honest, vulnerable, and together. and with my ear to all of this, i realize i’m listening to my own life too. it’s no wonder my brothers and i feel so deeply and wear this tender skin, because we were born in their tide, and belong to it, and have tossed around in it our whole lives.

i found this thin, glassy oval on our beach because at some point, the conch shed this door, slugged its way into a another shell, where it grew a thicker door. even for the ways i wish i could shed some of my sensitivity or grow a thicker door, i don’t really want to be anyone else. and i’m glad the sound of my blood pumping through my veins sounds just like the ocean. i think i’ll keep listening for it, because that’s just the way my heart is.

fooled by the rocks that i’ve got

this morning, i sat on the dunes in front of our house, facing the tide. these dunes have been melting away slowly, in the process of beach erosion. the north end wanes, the south end widens, and the whole shape of this island is changing. i guess its shape has always been changing and will continue to change, and any worn polaroid of our tall dunes and a wide, wild beach fades, and was only a snapshot of one moment in time, anyway.

the state of Georgia hauled in huge granite rocks two decades ago to slow down the erosion, and the community built big boardwalks at the ends of every other lane to provide more responsible beach access. we scatter sea oats on our dunes, with hopes that our lean portion of beach will last a little longer. but none of this keeps the dunes in place or stops time from doing what time does.

in the summer of 2000, our grandparents organized a time capsule burial for our family. they asked each of their grandchildren to contribute one item that represented the millennium year. we packed our stuff into an oversized pretzel barrel and our grandfather buried it deep in our yard, close to the dunes. just a few months later, they found it on the grass—a combination of time and tidal pressure had popped it out of the ground. my grandfather added a brick to the overstuffed container, and buried it again, but it was only a matter of time and tide before the sandy soil spit it back up again.

we cannot bury time, no matter how hard we try. i took hundreds of photographs all spring long. i wanted to stick a thumbtack into each moment, to pin my emotional landscape right in its tracks. that any landscape changes and continues to change with time is not only evident, but inevitable. no amount of bricks for the barrel or knocking boards together can rob time of its power, or hold a landscape still. the beach that was once wide, thins; the night that was once too short, becomes too long.

however we try to bury what is most sacred, or muscle the changes away, the whine and whim of the natural world is stronger; some things we cannot save. we’re fools to haul in the rocks, but what else are we to do? sometimes, we just want a little more time. 

motherland

i’m at the beach this week with my mom and my grandmother. we are three generations of Tallu—each of us very different and so much the same. i’m not exactly sure why i’m here, but i can’t think of a good reason to be anywhere else. it’s beautiful to be with these beautiful women and to find myself feeling beautiful right beside them.

there are important lessons we learn when we are alone. i’ve been there before, and faced myself while learning them, and it’s horrible and i’ll do it again. but it’s also important for us to know we are not alone. i am saying prayers of thanks with my laughter for the hot sun in Georgia, for these overspilling conversations, and for having this very good name. 

 

i live in a box of paints

a few pictures of my new place in Jamaica Plain, MA.

     

front hallway

front hallway

dining room

kitchen

kitchen sink

kitchen corner

kitchen pantry

kitchen pantry

bedroom

living room / studio

studio / office

studio corner

office

bathroom

how do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

i was putting corkboards up onto the walls of my art studio the other day. the whole thing was an ambitious endeavor—a project for two people, executed by one. standing on a table, i used a level and a ruler to find a good position for the first board, and drilled through it, right into the wall, making sure the holes in both matched up. after drilling the first hole, i held the board in place with my knee, and used my hands to change out the drill bit for the driver bit. i was standing so far from the floor, and it was not easy to keep my grip on everything with only two hands, and anyway, my hands are small.

i didn’t want these corkboards to fall down, so i lined them up with the studs in the walls as best as i could, and i put my weight against the drill to drive in the screws. but when i pressed hard, i stripped the screws clean of the metal that served to connect the bit to the screw. my angle was wrong or the whole position of my body; i was putting pressure in all the wrong places.

after doing this multiple times and getting frustrated, i let go of the board, which was already secured in one corner, while i changed from drill to driver. and the board actually stayed, more or less, in place. with freer, lighter hands, i put the screws into the wall without stripping them. and the boards looked great up there, even if a little different than i thought they would or imagined they ought to.

isn’t it the same in our relationships? i know i can strip those essential places of connection, in the process of driving hard towards some arbitrary expectation. and those expectations are always borne from my fears—that i’ll lose my grip, that i’m not that cool, that he’ll go away, that it will all fall down, that what we’re holding is too fragile to bear the brunt of a fall. and when i’m afraid it will fall down or look different than it used to look, i tend to put my hands all over it; i want to hold it closer, tighter, harder.

after two days of being up on the wall, the corkboards have shifted a little; they’re bowing and sagging in the middles, where i didn’t put any screws. to act as if i am big enough or strong enough to keep things in a place they once were, is only to screw myself into living as if we are people who don’t shift and sag and change, as if we are people who can calculate these things, as if we can catch clouds and pin them down.

so, along with any self-assurance or delight for this new place, comes a lot of being afraid. and the truth is, i’m scared to death. but i’m trying to relax and not put so much pressure on myself—and maybe, just as i learn to loosen up my tightened hands, i’ll step back and see something real and true still hanging on these walls.

the (grey-haired) tower of learning

the summer before i moved to new york, i took a job waiting tables in a restaurant on the Georgia coast. i served seafood, sweet tea and a variety of mayonnaise-based salads to locals and vacationers alike. i had to wear a hideous fish t-shirt that made me look like a moving aquarium, and i might have blended right into one, if it weren’t for the white socks i had to wear pulled halfway up my calf. i made mad money and saved every bit of it for my move to the city. it was a sandy job, but i loved the cash, the work and, eventually, the people i met there.

but my first day wasn’t easy. the manager on duty was stoned out of her mind, and she’d left her restaurant keys at home. so, we opened late and when she wasn’t mispronouncing my name, she was yelling words fat with bigotry to the rest of us on staff. i didn’t get the kind of training that day that left me feeling confident about the restaurant, my co-workers or the job.

i went home to tell my grandmother Tallu about my first day. i told her it sucked and i was too educated for the job and everyone on staff was a brand of south-Georgia republican that was homophobic and racist and i had no place working there. she asked me several good questions, and then became quiet. when she opened her mouth, she told me i was a snob, that she’d never heard me talk so close-minded, and that quitting was not an option until i’d worked the job for two weeks. then, she said, would be a good time to make my decision. i hated her for exposing me like this, but took her hard advice. i gave it two weeks, plus another two weeks and two months before it was time to leave the beach and head north for school.

it turned out my grandmother was right. it was an important choice to wait it out, because i learned more about myself working that dirty restaurant job than i could have ever imagined i would. and i learned some things don’t get easier, but that some things do. and some people don’t get easier, but they do get more beautiful when we listen to their stories or begin to understand where they come from. what came up for me over and over all summer long was not that i was afraid of knowing the people i worked with, but that i was afraid of being known by them.

at the close of my recent visit with my other grandmother Vivian, i leaned over to kiss her goodbye and she said to me “i pray you will find a job that uses what you have learned.” and she paused and continued a moment later, “and that in that job, you will learn even more.”

my grandmothers have learned so many lessons in their long lives. those of us fortunate enough to brush up against them glean from their lived wisdom. i’m trying to steep in it now, as i sort and sift through my hard-edged opinions about employment, and all my options, remembering it is a privilege to get to choose my work, remembering to open myself to whatever i find, remembering how every choice matters and remembering i’ve got lessons and lessons and lessons to learn.