My soul is much larger than me
Dispatch #12: My stay at the Rivertown Lodge
Hi friend,
This April I did something I’ve never done before. I booked myself a workation (I know, I know: work & vacation are opposites, workation is not a real thing, language fails us, but it’s the only word I’ve got, okay?) at Rivertown Lodge in Hudson, NY.
While Angel held down the fort, I borrowed a friend’s car & headed upstate for the much needed space & time to make headway on 2 (exciting!) projects: 1. working on the 3rd draft of my novel & 2. writing 20 episodes for my upcoming return to The Slowdown as a guest host. (You can find my 10 episodes from last summer at the bottom of this page!)
Not even 48 hours into my stay I found myself in the throes of the worst spring allergies I’ve had in a decade. In those almost-48-hours, between sitting at my desk adding to my word count, I had been been prancing about main street, sipping this, munching that, pulling vintage sweaters over my head, all in all enjoying galavanting about. Now I was forced to confine myself to the small hotel room, leaving only twice a day only to grab lunch & dinner as quickly as possible from the nearest spot possible. Once back inside, I’d shower, change into pollen-free clothes, & sit back down to either work or ‘cation.
What Louise Adamic once said is true: “Living is like licking honey off a thorn.” Just when I thought I’d set up a perfect getaway/hideaway for myself & my imagination, I couldn’t stop sneezing. I lay, exhausted, in bed, trying not to feel guilty or pressured.
Isn’t this how it always is?
Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron once advised, “Your ducks will never be in a row.” Well, ecksqueeeeze me.
But she’s right. Don’t hate the player (Pema, in this case), hate the game. Or, to fully mix our metaphors, don’t even hate the game - lick the honey right off it.
So I listened to Adamic & to Chodron. I licked the honey. I stopped trying to control those ducks & let ‘em duck wildly around. I watched almost an entire season of Gilmore Girls. I worked on my chapters slowly, like a snail, little lick-foot by lick-foot, between bouts of sneezehaustion (take that, workcation! Two can play this game!) I pulled a single card from my new playing card set (purchased down the road at the wonderful bar/bookstore The Spotty Dog) & did DIY tarot. I took my polaroid camera with me on the quick walk to pick up take-out & felt a quiet thrill at what I saw.
While lying in bed, tired, Luke falling for Lorelei in the background, I kept my journal close. The TV hummed & the sun set on another day. I felt a bit down. You might recall that I mentioned the Nap Ministry in my last newsletter; in moments like this, needing to slow down, desiring productivity, & feeling the cultural finger-wag against rest, I held their ethos incredibly close. This rest is not just necessary, I told myself, this rest is sacred. Head on the pillow, I let myself drift back & forth from the television, texted with my dear friend Bobby, & doodled.
Bobby told me about a beautiful dream they had, which included me & someone very near to them who is physically gone from this world. As we texted, I got chills. Bobby mentioned that - in their dream - me & this dear, dear human were talking in an empty train car in the mountains. Back to waking life: for the past few days, I’d been editing a chapter in my novel which takes place - of all places - in a train car in the mountains. I felt my breath deepen, the quiet of my small hotel room deepen, & most vividly, “the mystery that is our context for living” (thank you for that language, Fantastic Fungi) deepen.
What a mystery we are a part of. While we sleep, unseen threads braid together & light up, passing strange currents of carnal electricity.
I long to be as vividly reminded of our interconnectivity & mystery during my waking hours. This is the task of my days. To wake up when I’m awake.
What a conundrum that awake, our consciousness above-ground, it is harder to take steps toward mystery’s horizon. The to-do list gets in the way, shouting, I’m the important one here! Or I get mired in The Way Things Are, not The Way Things Could Be. Bobby’s synchronistic dream shook me out of my ordinary physics. It made me feel that we’re all connected in the strangest ways, ways that may not be obvious to me, ever. The little chapter I worked on, Bobby’s gone beloved, grief resurrected as soft conversation within a mountain landscape: all connected, somehow.
I bid Bobby an emoji-filled “talk to you soon, my love.” Flooded with aliveness, I jotted a few thoughts in my notebook as quickly as possible.
No matter what someone else might make of such moments - whether one’s urge is to blow them up into HUGE MEANINGFUL LIFE-CHANGING MOMENTS TM!!!! or to minimize them into NOTHING BUT SOME SILLY SPIRITUAL MUMBO JUMBO C’MON PAL GO READ A SCIENCE TEXTBOOK, it’s really all the same to me. What I take from a moment like this one is how I felt texting with Bobby.
I felt a part of their dream-life. I felt connected to their very important, gone beloved. I felt my novel was somehow reaching Bobby already, teasing the corners of their consciousness.
I felt loved, being held in their sleeping mind. I felt loving of their imagination. I felt a small part of a very big picture.
Maybe most importantly, I felt that I didn’t need to know what it meant or how it all fit together. I just knew, felt, that we are inextricably & deeply connected.
For someone who had only just a few minutes before felt down for not producing & being sick & needing to rest, all of these feelings meant a lot. Two weeks later, they still mean a lot. What might it mean to move through life with the understanding that one’s soul is much larger than them & that the soul’s lattice-work far exceeds our perception. I’m curious. I want to keep myself open to that.
What are some meaningful moments of synchronicity that you’ve experienced? Let me know in the comments.
It hasn’t been officially announced yet, but I wanted to let you all know first, exclusively, that I’ll be teaching a Tin House Craft Intensive this June.
I’m really excited about these three hours we’ll have together. I am obsessed with poets who write dignity, desire & dimension with vividness, & invite us to stretch our imagination. The course description reads, “When we honor all beings for their singularity and vitality, real love begins. This session will investigate how to craft poems of encounter with deeper empathy and imagination.” You can access the full description by clicking on the flyer above.
Inspired by an In Surreal Life participant, Katie Sadow, in May I’ll be keeping a Questions Journal. As some of you may know, I had a Gratitude Journal for 6 years & it profoundly affected me. I wrote a little bit about it here (2019) & here (2020).
What is a Questions Journal, you might be wondering? In Katie’s words,
“One my my fave practices (erratic, though at times has been more ritualized, routined) is writing down questions. Sometimes, one-a-day is a sizable challenge for me, or a slew (sometimes connected, sometimes not). It helps to remind me that I’m curious even if I don’t feel it in the moment, & sometimes the questions themselves feel like the start of something that wants to be made. E.g., a question I wrote down a few years ago that still feels like it’s asking to turn into a poem: “Why do I feel like I used to have wings?”
Katie also gave a few other incredible examples from her journal: “What is it like to be a mouse? How does moss dream? What secrets live in mist?”
Will you join me in turning “May” into “May?” Let me know in the comments if you’re up for the challenge! Let’s see what questions populate our spring days. It’ll be an exercise in not knowing, in wonder-ing.
On that note, here’s to the mystery, befuddlement & awe! Word on the street is they prefer to be courted by questions. So, off we go, friends! I’ll start us off:
Do doors have preferences as to who walks through them?
If water had a voice, what would it sound like?
Is there a heaven for shed hair, clipped fingernails?
What if you could hold time in your hands?
With ample maple syrup,
