Mixtape No. 2
A return to stillness and everything that's caught my eye lately
When the days move too quickly and we move too far and too frequently within the days, an irritable imbalance begins to invade my body and mind. Everything feels at once entirely incomplete but also far too much, as my attention is whiplashed from one critical task to another, and the sense that I cannot take a deep breath is not just a metaphor, but the reality of the tightness and restlessness in my chest.
These days of relentless busyness and movement feel like unwanted distraction, like I am being kept from what I require most, from what’s most important, and I know that the only way back lies in quiet, in stillness, in solitude. But this is often a hard thing to find when you live on and with the ocean.
Our schedule over the last two weeks has been through some gorgeous and terrifying Costa Rican terrain (I wrote about some of this in my most recent Letters From Sea essay, which I have just decided to make public and free to all, in case you missed it or wanted to read it in full), but the pace of it all has been consuming. My brain has been at capacity just deciding what to make for dinner, let alone drafting fresh ideas or interesting stories.
Even though my drafts folder runneth over with lines and notes and ramblings, to develop them into a coherent piece requires a space I do not currently have. I think of some words from Mari Andrew which explain the aimlessness required to distill the swirling of life into a creative thing:
The majority of my writing process, if you can even call it such a thing, is to take walks, look at things, talk to people, and take note of which memories stick over time. If you see me at my laptop tip-typing away, I’m rarely working; I’m usually searching for emotional YouTube videos about interspecies friendships, or writing emails. If you see me walking aimlessly through Brooklyn Bridge Park, burying my feet in the gravel every few steps because I crave the sound, I’m busy at work.
It might be easy to assume that living on a boat, constantly immersed in the elements, that life is ripe with moments of burying my feet in the gravel (or sand), offering countless windows into the wide, expansive perspectives that feel like peace, like deep healing breaths, the kinds of perspectives that connect the pieces that make it all make sense. And these moments do exist, to be sure, but sometimes it’s more akin to what I imagine its like raising children: the moments where the fulfilling perspectives frame the entire project in meaning and salience are often buried beneath the frenzy of day to day tasks and various unforeseen accidents and moods and chaos, and sometimes the magic and beauty of it all needs to be intentionally rescued from the rip tides of anxieties that naturally build when you are responsible for keeping another life safe and well. And maybe that’s not a feature of life on a sailboat or life with children, but rather just a feature of life.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that I haven’t had the bandwidth to create much lately. While I’ve been typing away at my desk a fair amount, the moments where I am at work, when I’m pushing my feet into the earth and have the space to reflect and think about anything beyond our next moves and the safety and comfort of our home, have been few. Everything is shortened: my view is only of what’s right here or coming next, I begin to feel distanced from my husband, disconnected from myself.
I was recently recounting my experience at a week-long silent meditation retreat to some curious friends, and it reminded me just how much I gained from so much stillness, how thoroughly I loved and still deeply cherish that experience, and how much I am longing for that feeling again these days. So I’m also saying that over the next two weeks I am going to be taking some intentional time to reclaim this stillness, this peace, this body and mind, and reconnect with my sacred solitude. To establish an expansive and encompassing perspective, to carve some space, to check in on my “real” life, as Mary Sarton says:
It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone.
(via The Marginalian)
I’ll be back soon (this applies to my podcast as well, for those of you who follow me there). And my hope is that if you, too, feel as though life is a fast-moving treadmill that has you tethered to nothing but long steady strides away from yourself right now, that you can find a way to step off long enough to just wiggle your feet in the earth for a few grounding breaths.
In the meantime, here are ten things that I have been reading, listening to, and that got me thinking over the past few weeks. There is a surprising album I can’t stop listening to, poems that speak to this sacred s p a c e, how regularly considering death can be a gateway to a richer life, why traditional school is missing key features to cultivate meaning and a sense of purpose, the curious but fascinating way humans require responsiveness from the world, how we relate to our past selves, and more, including a bunch of photos from my life lately in Costa Rica.
Most of this will be for my paid subscribers, which reminds me: did you know? Fifty bucks gets you a full year of access to everything here. Your support is deeply appreciated and every new paid subscriber makes me smile with glee and high five myself.
I hope something in here piques your interest, sparks some insight, or brings you joy.
What I’m reading
I remember one afternoon a few years back where I was struck by the realization that one reason that anyone would intentionally cause pain to another is so they can know that they themselves are real. Destroying something with your two hands or purposefully hurting someone in any way is what Sasha might call a desperate grab for responsiveness: the feedback — from a person, a job, a relationship, or an environment — that we not only appreciate, but require in order to feel any level of satisfaction.
Grasping for responsiveness is responsible for a lot of chaos. When relationships are locked in a seemingly unbreakable pattern, paramours cause drama. When people feel imprisoned by an impersonal environment, they vandalize. When the downtrodden feel that the political system doesn’t represent their interests, they elect lunatics who pretend to.
As he says, “Life is good if it squishes nicely when you poke it.” Seeking responsiveness and creating feedback and in our lives can be constructive and beneficial or destructive and harmful — an awareness of our own pokes into the worlds we inhabit can help us create more beauty and less pain.
Just a staggering piece of writing that fully captivated me and is still lingering in my mind, weeks later.
The decisions we make for ourselves when we stay far away from the inevitable fact of mortality are a different breed of decisions than those we make when we look right at it.
When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.
(On this note I would also recommend subscribing to Death and Birds by Chloe Hope)