Grief, part 2.

 

The thing about crying in public -- and I don't mean writing-workshop-this-is-a-safe-space sort of crying--but unexpected emotion in a place it doesn't belong, is that it is easier the second time around. 

The first time: I was in a Milpitas movie theater with a friend, watching a Bollywood film about a girl whose fiancé dumps her and she chooses to go on her honeymoon alone. What was the line her mother said that made me bawl over the possibility that I'd never have a child? I don't remember anymore. Last week, in the theater, I cried in the dark as my daughter bopped along to the song a pig sang to an elephant: "we'll still be friends, even after it ends." 

Grief, I am learning, doesn't get easier, but more familiar. The ways it can sneak up on you and refuse to go unacknowledged. The little ways you learn to release it into the world. First it was huge, too big for any words to encompass, and each time I tried it spilled past the confines of sentences into rambles, a river I could not tame. Now my words are measured. I smile and say thank you when someone acknowledges this loss. I know it will take my voice, my breath sometimes, and yes it is uncomfortable, and sometimes I stop in strange places to sit with it, like in the parking lot while my daughter plays in the park, or in the last row at the children's theater. 

Love, untethered

 

I send the text message knowing my father will never see it. I know my mother checks his cellphone now. And still I wait for those two blue checkmarks telling me it was seen from his phone. Incomplete closure. She knows I send them for him. I know it is her on the other end. But we never talk about this on our daily calls, my mother and I. The many ways we hold peace, sorrow. 

I've been thinking a lot about people as repositories for the emotions we place in them. Grief, in a way, is love untethered. Emotion as refugee, uprooted and wandering. The times I want to call, the conversations in my head. Knowing that the next story that publishes is one he will never read. The little things you don't know matter until they cease to exist. Whether it is this profound awareness of the small sorrows or just an overwhelm of feelings in need of anchor, I'm deeply moved by small acts of generosity. 

The friend who picked my child up the night we packed, fed and entertained her in a space removed from sorrow, at least temporarily. The one who showed up at the airport and handed me the sunglasses off her head because I forgot mine, along with medicines and a car seat, the other things I forgot. The one who sends an email helping me source a story, because work must happen even when it feels impossible. The space people hold for me, a small measure of the space left by his absence. 

 

Stick your head in

 

On the drive to the pool, I remind my daughter of her love for the water; of how the ocean holds Moana up and it will hold her too; of her strength; of her brain that remembers how her muscles should move. Still, week after week, I watch the same exchange with her instructor: 

"Focus, you've got this!" 

She spins in place, her face above the surface, squeal-shouting. 

"Believe in yourself."

She spins in place, her face above the surface, squeal-shouting.

"Pick a stroke and come get me!"

She spins in place, flails her arms the wrong way, going nowhere.

Week after week, I watch and wonder at her struggle. Why is it so hard, this simple thing? 

I've spent the last four days flailing in words on an assignment that was given to me because it's something I've written about before, and I'm one of only a handful who have. And yet. I didn't know the material. I should've done more reporting. What was even there to say about this that people didn't know already? I asked for an extension. I flailed some more. Took some naps. Complained to a friend. Pored over my notes. This afternoon, something shifted. The words were in me. I didn't need more reporting or other examples. My story was right here, where I'd been spinning in place for four days. All I had to do was take a deep breath and dive in. 

Why is it so hard, this simple thing? 

It's been a rough few days -- nothing terrible, but I've been struggling to find balance and beauty, which seem to go hand in hand for me. The latter is easy to find when I'm calm, and it's a lot easier to be grace-full in the presence of beauty. For today, this snippet on my walk, a translation of a line from a song: 

"when the sunray landed, it wrote on the dewdrop these stories of the clouds." 

Color this beautiful

My daughter stood on her tiptoes and reached into the fridge for a snack, then brought it over for help opening it. She poured herself a cup of water. When we moved into this house, her curly head barely reached the bottom of the refrigerator door. The water dispenser was way out of reach. I no longer have to interrupt my workout when she needs a snack. Little things, big milestones. Every day I am awestruck by how she unfurls into the world. 

When I learn things myself (writing, riding a bike, learning to be patient, whatever), I feel pride and growth. When she learns, I feel mostly wonder. Pride, as all parents feel, I suppose, but mostly awe. Things I didn't know before becoming a parent: that it is possible to look at another human being and see them at all their ages at once, a continuum of being from past to future. Her five-year-old body, no longer covered in baby fat, holds floppy, fuzzy newborn heft and the promise of long muscle. This growth is an eventuality both mundane and mind-blowing. 

There is obvious wonder in expansion and possibility. Can I approach the other end of life with the same sense of awe? Human brains shrink with age. The change is as irreversible as my daughter outgrowing her onesies. Each day she grows is a day of babyhood that will never return. We shed memories old and new all the time. The mystery of forgetting: How this person who does not remember talking to me five minutes ago still knows my dislike of cooked carrots when she stirs them into lunch. This is mundane miracle too, when a mind sheds the world that is too much. 

Can I learn to be amazed instead of afraid? Can I learn to love the colors instead of regretting the end of summer? Fall was always my favorite season. 

[Post title: "Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!” -- Andre Gide]

Don't talk about guns.

 

It is okay to take the time to breathe. To think of the ones who never will again. To ride these waves of air, each one bearing me closer to the ones who struggle to catch their breath today. This sea of grief we share. I couldn't sleep last night thinking of shoes in the hallway or the garage. Toys on the floor, the notes to selves in the morning that they'd make their kids clean up when they got home. In years when I hurt too much for my own words, I'd grab others' descriptions and fling them into my own sorrow, hoping to plug the hole, block the pain, soothe the wound, repair that gaping mouth with things that belonged to other people. Today I see those words and they slip past before I can grab on. Instead I hold this imagined mess: shoes. toys. two days' worth of laundry. mud from the park. crayons. endless art. 

Parallel

 

Two projects on my plate: 

One involves working with a class of preschoolers to create a piece of art. Every child will contribute. I keep the thing on track and on budget. I can give them colors and paper and brushes, but can't control what they will do with them. Still, it's up to me to make the final product beautiful, cohesive. 

The other involves working with 9 other highly-qualified professionals in my line of work. Each of us will contribute. I have a deadline and a word count. The higher ups have provided themes and ideas. Our job is to make the final product beautiful, cohesive, and delivered on time. 

The vagueness of each weighs on my mind. Ten days from deadline, I wish the outlines were more apparent. But I sometimes use paints and paper to muddle my way through story structure, and there is an odd comfort now to the instability of both pieces. To parallel a favorite poet: If the ground held still, we'd have no need for balance. You only seek your footing when the ground is unstable. 

Tomorrow is a drowning girl

 

There is a girl who weighs many tons in a river in Spain. She's supposed to be art. She floats, drowns, submerges and resurfaces as the water shifts. She's made of fiberglass, apparently. I don't know if water erodes fiberglass. If she were rock or earth, wood or flesh, her surface would wear down and crack, and each time she reappeared she would be less herself and more water. One day she might be water itself. 

This I know because about twenty years ago I wrote what it feels like to be the person trying to avoid slipping into the dark. I hold on to stuff, and each day is a little harder. Each time I slip, it is harder to shake the water off. Even on days the river runs dry and joy is blinding sunshine the water claims a little more. I can cling to rock or shore, but the contours of the river, the weight of its water, these are as much part of me as the things I hold close. I think the river has a name. I think there are ways to tame the water. Some day I will be strong enough to reach for them. Tomorrow, perhaps this will all be art. Today, I  drown. 

Unfeathered

 

Hope is not a pretty tune. It is not an air-filled bone you can snap with the fingers of one hand. 

Hope is the lumbering beast that sits heavy on your chest in the dark. It is the sore body that drags itself out of bed today and tomorrow and the day after, over, over again. 

Hope is not golden sunshine. It is the screaming purple that appears when you stretch bruise-blackened flesh. It is the hand that drives blade and needle into that ache to draw blood. To try one more time to restore life, not knowing what that life might be, knowing only that life is better than necrosis.  

Hope is no sweet song in a storm. It is the parched-throat cry that screams Enough when it would much rather get a drink of water and look away. Because it trusts that there is a better away worth looking to, worth screaming for. 

Hope is the darkness that lights itself on fire anew each day. Because it knows that something must burn to bring the light. 

Hope is the arms that roll up sleeves and get to work after the party. 

Hope, my dear Emily, is not a songbird that won't shut up. 

Book impressions

 

Realizing that what I write after a book is not so much a review as an impression of its lingering shadows, the way its footprints have contoured my consciousness. That these new dips and curves, corners of toes will remain in the way my mind interfaces with the world around me. 

And having said that, this book is a bestseller recommended by dear friends years ago. It failed to hold my attention, though I've tried several times to pick it up over the last five-ish years. This fall, something clicked. And it's been oddly comforting to read of a blind girl and white-haired boy traversing the insane uncertainty of a world war. Part of that comfort stems from the writer's voice. When you read, does the book sound a certain way in your head? Some books have no sound, others are just my own voice. Some sound like the writer. This one--I don't know what the writer sounds like--but this one is old and young, history and fantasy, and certainly not mine. 

This is a voice of wonder and innocence, sustained and uplifted through every page. Childlike in how pure its emotions are. Fear, all-encompassing. This moment amongst the snails, absolute. This hunger, complete. Each line, each paragraph sucks you in until there is nothing beyond it, nothing before or after.  Meditative and inexorable in its intensity. And each moment in the story spirals upward, from sea to sky to the nature of love and light. Light cleared by wind, the voice says, and I smell a washed sky.  

(The book: All the light we cannot see, by Anthony Doerr)

On being brown

I don't know where I stand. Not black, not white. This is what brown looks like: I have been followed around as I tried on clothing. Harassed by cab drivers, multiple times. Told my backpack wasn't allowed in the grocery store. Told to go home.

Today, in a virtual room with some of the white people I feel safest with, one person asked: Where do they get the message that they aren't welcome? The question was addressed to another immigrant, who mentioned that some other immigrants she knows feel unwelcome/ uncomfortable with the emotions in the air right now. My immigrant friend in the room can pass as white. I spoke up, only because these are the people I know they are. They are far more than just allies.

As is my child's white nanny, who told me earlier this week how sad she felt that all white people were being labeled racist. I stumbled over words to explain how it felt to be on a 6-hour boat ride with a man wearing a certain red hat and a giant, shiny hunting knife on his belt.

I don't remember what I said to the group today. Except that the world changed in November 2016. My grocery store, the one in liberal California, was a place I questioned. I don't exactly paint all white people the bad guys. But I will not let down my guard until they prove they're good.  Those stickers in store windows that proclaim everyone is welcome? They make me feel a tiny bit safer. Perhaps they're like anti-red hats. It took a massive amount of courage to say these things. I am still shaking and teary from it.

And now remember: I am not black. I have only seen a fraction of the injustices a black person in this country has, and faced them only as an adult. I am privileged, with my money and "model immigrant" status at banks and jobs and elsewhere. And remember: I, a not-black person, said this to five white people who I know beyond all doubt are allies.

Dear white ally, if you are still reading, know this: This is a sliver of what your black friends are feeling. Stand with them, but ask them how you make them feel. Ask what you--yes, you, dear white person at the protest--can do differently every day. Be prepared to hear they have nothing to say to you. To hear your friend was putting on a performance to fit in. To hear you're the bad guy until proven otherwise. If you find it difficult to sit with those things, think hard before you stand up to protest. Because when you stand a white shield protecting a black body, you need to know that your shield was forged in the same privilege that wields the guns and hate.

I don't know where I stand. I can protect myself, if not from casual racism, at least from the more egregious social injustices of being denied loans or employment or safe housing.

I don't need a shield. My skin makes a poor one. Would I have spoken up in that room today if I were black? Perhaps being brown and privileged is this. Having a voice in a safe space. If not a shield, perhaps what I can offer is a little light.

In this together

The thing I miss most is being able to go. Go to the store, to the airport, to a meeting, just away.
That lost time where I hold coffee and boarding pass in one hand while I reach for the wallet in my handbag to pay for the cereal bars I always stock at home and forget to pack. Will I remember the moves to this shuffle when I fly alone next? I miss browsing paperbacks with no intent to buy. The ability to touch new spines, new words, new spaces in the minutes before we lift weightless into blue sky.

This is what I miss, the time I stayed up all night answering emails and doing laundry before getting on a flight to see my parents. That time we took vacations on a whim. This going to the airport, dropping the rental car off, the hiss of the shuttle bus as the doors close and we go. Go toward home, anywhere. Go wash dishes, leave them to drip-dry on the black granite of my mother's counters. Go away from here.

And in lieu of that we are here. Here in this strange place of indeterminate time where people drop like flies. Where I worry that my parents must wash their own dishes and worry if the neighbors go in to help. Fear if you touch the wrong potato at the grocery store. Hope that me staying home, you staying put, this whole planet of us halted in a collective freeze dance to the tune of love will keep them safe, these places and people and hearts so far beyond where any flight will take us now.

This universal exercise in holding still. Learning to make like a tree, rooted where we are planted, we grow things. One friend's sourdough smells like old socks but will make beautiful bread, she says. Another sows cilantro for the first time. We notice sparrow song and where the cobblestones in the backyard dip to make a puddle where my daughter's rainboots fit. She hops and hops and lifts against the air until she is breathless.

We dig deep, into ourselves and earth and pantry and couch and all these places we hope will be safe. Strongholds where we can burrow, grow, emerge stronger collectively. Stay, we say. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay still. Stay strong. Stay well. Perhaps if we dig deep enough these illusions of home and wellness and strength will flourish within our planted, stationary selves. Perhaps this is how notions of home evolve from visions of cheery warmth into the jagged, frayed, sticky truth of family that never leaves no matter how far you go. Perhaps this is how love branches across the distant world, the way leaf tip never touches root and yet is always connected. Perhaps this is how we learn how we are all together, always. Even when I go, I stay. Even when I am here, I am there.

(Five months into the 2020 pandemic)

Pipe dreams

My breath catches on the smoke-filled air of Delhi today, a city I haven't returned to in nearly twenty years. In 2014, I remember what one person's victory felt like: the smell of burning tires. The cold metal bars on the locked gates of our apartment complex. A tall, dark barrier that kept me safe. The bars were easy to grasp, a support I could lean on as I looked out beyond. But they didn't block out the night air, or the sound of broken glass, or the stories of friends who slept with home-made bombs by their pillows.

We all agree this needs to end. But no one will stop until they're proved right. Here, two thoughts from more lucid minds:

1. "When there is a battle between right and right, a value higher than right must prevail. And that value is life itself." (Israeli novelist Amos Oz).

2. "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." (David Mitchell, in Cloud Atlas).

Otto Frank and countless other survivors forgave their captors after the Holocaust. They lived horrors and moved beyond them. Here, we kill and maim in the name of blood spilled so long ago it's the dust beneath our feet. In the fight of right and right there is no end to vengeance. But there is another way, if only we're willing to listen to other possibilities.

So yes, I dream of forgiveness and kindness and stuff my pipe with words of peace. I speak for kindness. I think of impossible things each day: that blood remain encased in skin. that no houses burn.  With each breath I stand for equality. I pray that these  wisps of air traverse the impossible distance between here and there.

Metta meditation

It's funny how people in movies struggle with the words I love you. The hardest three to me are these: You hurt me. They're the ones I don't say when I snap. The ones that get tucked under snarky jokes, pointed opinions, my calling out your behavior. I suspect I'm not alone in this. And perhaps this is why I find it somewhat easy to forgive--or at least recognize--it in others. When you lash out, there's a chance it comes from a place that has nothing to do with whatever exchange we're having in the moment.

Tending to another person's visible wounds is obvious, instinctive. These cuts, though, are mine. They sting and make me coil away from the people that rendered them. I don't call even when I know I should. I don't want to pretend nothing's wrong when your words still hurt. We laughed them off, and to them it's forgotten.

To me, it's a lifetime of hearing that I didn't matter all that much, wasn't noticed. Who wants to be told, after all, that their childhood--that time in life when people are the most lovable--was almost entirely overlooked? (Your daughter really reminds me of your brother. You? Hmm, we don't remember anything about you honestly. She's just like you when she cries, does that help?) Ask my brother, and he'll tell you a different story. I was spoiled, never corrected, never told what to do. (Though maybe the freedom that comes from being overlooked is a kind of spoiling, a chance to grow ignored and unfettered. Parenting thoughts for a different day.)

But I digress. These comments have flown at me through the years. The specifics don't matter. I realize these are universal problems. Or non-problems. Each of us, my family included, have their own stories of hurtful words flung at them. In the big world, these things are trivial. I know I am loved in some way. I know I can go home to them. I can be kind to them. How do I deal with the words though?

You might say I should let them slide. But they slide under my skin and wedge there like thorns. Every move pricks with the reminder that I am insignificant, unnoticed. If I pluck them out, where do I put them? They can't be returned, for they'd only hurt the people who said them instead. They can't be unharnessed to fly into the world out of context, where they'd be turned into caricature or cliche in some comedian's skit about Indian parents.

I could hold them here in my skin, let time stitch scars over them and make the hurt my own. Trouble is, I don't want to be that person who holds these things as part of my story. I may have been unnoticed, but I choose to believe I was loved. I want to be kind to myself. Pick the barbs out, soothe flesh and stanch blood. I want to pick the phone up and call them without hiding hurt. I want to practice metta. But I don't know how.

I turn the word over in my mind. Loving-kindness. Metta, over and over until it morphs into other things. The words for earth in Hindi. Earth where you can bury anything: thorn, seed, carcass. Not everything grows in the earth. Most turns to soil. Hidden, unnoticed, it all turns to mud. Perhaps this is how I learn to be kind to myself. Yes, I am hurt. Your comments hurt me. I will let them sink deep, rest untended. In time they will crumble. Sentences will become words, letters, shapes, squiggles, until they lose all meaning, until they are no more than rich new earth.

Affirmation

6:30 am in mid-September means dawn is grey-black, sluggish like my body. Yesterday a friend 12 years older than I commiserated over email about how our limbs cling to weight as we age.
What is it that makes it hard to let go?

I think about this when I pull clumps of hair out the drain, wrap strands gathered off the floor around my fingers, a few grays mixed in now. I was born with a single gray hair -- a sign of great intelligence, or that my mother loves me deeply. Or just the obvious, that our bodies were never perfect. The rest of this mane was once a source of pride, my connection to Jo March and writerly ambitions and independent womanhood growing up. Now I ignore the grays on the floor and my scalp. They're part of what remains -- and the loss of each strand, black or gray, is muted yet present.

I think about this as I step into my daughter's room. She refuses to sleep there, so we moved her bed into ours. This room with its pink pom-poms on the ceiling, stacks of toys and books on the walls is mine for now. The cotton-ball bunny she made at daycare for Easter is still clipped on a string, googly eyes watching my neck, arms, legs, creak through these morning stretches.

It's easier than usual to focus today, though harder than it used to be. I think about what to pack for her lunch. Bring my attention back to the crick in my neck when I lean. I didn't realize my right calf was tight. The left hip pain I thought was gone is still here, pushing through when I dip into the first bend of the day. I face the east, the sky lightens. The neighbor's tree blocks their view of me. I wonder if they planted it for this privacy. I wonder if the girl who grew up in this room leaned out this window at night and watched the moon.

Bring my attention back. Lift my feet against the wall, invert into a shoulder stand. I've never felt my shoulders shake like this before. I cannot do another inversion. What am I afraid of? There is no one to see me fall, a carpet to soften the landing. But heart and body refuse to release something, and today is not my day to float on my fingers.

What is my intention here? Yoga instructors love affirmations. But my mind is on full moons and little girls and Friday the 13th and remembering how my 70-year-old father lifts his hips effortlessly into a shoulder stand and once-upon-a-time-dances and no, I cannot find a positive thought to focus on.

There is only this. This racing breath in a lightening room and this body that bends. Creaking, fearful, but still moving. And for today, this is affirmation enough. That my limbs and lungs still move air, and over and over with each movement we make breath, and making breath is making life.
And if life itself can be made anew each instant, what is there to hold on to? What is it we fear to let go?

Listen, just listen

When the two-year-old says she's missing her friends from her old school. When she says she doesn't want to go to school. When she says she's upset that mama has to go to work. When she cries even as her new teacher hugs her.

I miss them. I'm upset. I'm sad. I was naughty. 

I can hold her entire body in my arms, but her words stretch the edges of my heart. I fumble and stutter. I know you miss them, but we had to move because you needed to learn new things. It'll get better. You know mama always comes for you, don't you? But you like Miss R. She looks away and goes quiet, and I know it's still on her mind. I wonder what her teens will be like. And recall writing in my diary as a fifteen-year-old words I could never get my mother to understand: Listen, just listen. Don't tell me what to do. Don't tell me why. Don't tell me to get over it.  Just listen. Tonight, I'll try just that, with my old voice and hers.

Book, marked.

Embrace.
Tent.
Knife.
Light.
Mile marker.
Foothold.
Straw.
Tattoo.

- A swift sampling.
Stories are more than words.
The things we make with words grow beyond themselves.
They take flight, slice wounds, wrap hearts safe.
If your words formed a sculpture, what shape would they take?
If your story were an animal, would it stomp, hop, or run?
What song would keep pace with its rhythm?

Simple time

Last December the curry leaf plant shoved a new sprig out in our massive hallway, but it shriveled soon after. I've swept a small shrub's worth of leaves off the floor in the months since. Each day it looks a little sicker. Today, though, its browning leaves seemed a touch brighter when I moved the blinds. The little Monstera has a new leaf. Daffodils I forgot in the car two days ago decided to open up anyway.

Surrounded by brick and drywall, encased in plastic, far from tropical warmth and the invisible rhythm of the spinning planet, plants still keep time to the seasons. This is houseplant magic: A promise that like the plants, we who live by alarms and in too-bright nights can still keep wordless, peaceful pace with the world beyond.

Claiming ground

The snow still falls, all day sometimes. But the earth is warm, and green sprouts are pushing out, and the cold melts to slake their thirst. Our first daffodil bloomed the day before the last round of snow. There's something unusually special about the first flower on a patch of the earth that's all your own (okay, mostly the bank's, but still, you know what I mean).

The day after, my daughter smashed a pink ball into one of my favorite plants. It destroyed a large leaf, and it might be one of the few times I've truly scolded her. She's not quite two, and still learning to be gentle. She hugged the plant and tried to stick it back. Some things aren't fixed that way, I told her.

My mother laughed when I told her this. She's the best thing you are growing, she said. But I still care about my plant! And she needs to learn, I reply. Then I hear she's struggling to sit quietly at daycare. She won't listen, they tell me. She ignores us when we tell her that if she can't sit for lunch, we'll move the chair away. She pulls a drawer out on the play kitchen and tries to climb to the top of the toy. She never sits still for class photos, her curls a flying blurry backdrop to the row of smiling faces in the messages I get.

I'm upset by this. If she can't listen, if she can't hold still, how will she learn, I wonder? How can she grow into the person I know she will be? How will her brain absorb words and facts and imagine great things? They tell me about sensory toys and hidden ADHD. She's not yet TWO, my brain yells.

A year ago she couldn't walk yet. She is finding her feet, her limbs, her voice. Let her climb. Let her fall. If it were a tree you'd be thrilled at her "exploring nature". Let her flail and yell and stomp and learn. Let her discover how she can stretch, how strong she is. Let her topple the toys, rake the earth, climb the tables, turn this strange earthly social structure we've planted her into. Let her stand and eat lunch. Let her dig and splash and watch soil turn dark as snow melts to water. Let her learn how to push her own growing tips through the spaces around her. Let her bloom.

Moving on

Because sometimes rolling like a stone is an act of artistry. To lumber past the links that annoy, the photos that trigger, the words that trip your brain into an eruption of punctuation that clamors to be turned into words. Browsing the internet-- watching friends, reading for work, researching your toddler's suspicious rash-- each tap of my fingers requires conscious, constant restraint. How do I choose when to engage?

Yesterday, a woman declaring her thrill at meeting an anti-vaxxer in a moms group that bans vaccine discussions. I stepped in, asked that her post be removed. Today, a woman writing about her experience at a strip club: she was young and didn't know where to look, unsure what to do in the presence of her male co-workers and a mid-forties mother of two. I want to ask- what relevance does the other woman's age or maternal status have to your discomfort? Are older mothers less embarrassed, less likely to be sexually assaulted? I move on. The outlet isn't one I'm interested in, though our writing group where she shared her work is. 

I don't always choose wisely. I engage more than I should, snarl more than is smart, and could afford to be kinder, online and offline. Perhaps it's the sharp sounds of my fingers on the keys, the way they strike in clacks and taps and thwacks. Would a soft-touch keypad make me kinder? In lieu of browsing Amazon or Google Scholar, I look away for a minute.

Outside the world is green and blue and sun and wind. Frost on grass flashes light like gemstones. A brown leaf taps to the rhythm of the wind, soft under the twigs of a shrub poised to bloom, come spring. The breeze is soft. There are no leaves to be ruffled. And for the span of a few minutes, it makes me less confused. There is nothing to clatter about here. No clamor to still, no outrage to quell. It's just a backyard going about the work of growth and death and the spaces between. I linger, my chaos of words and deadlines quelled in watching this patch of the planet at work.

Moving on is an act of conscious grace. Each minute a choice-- of when to move on, when to linger and engage.