I Know How to Return to Her

and that's enough for me

“The question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this: How can this story – this experience – be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use?

To talk back to myself: experience is instructive. People make connections on their own. When I make a metaphor, I offer the comparison, but the distance between vehicle and tenor is distance the reader must cross. I can’t carry you from one to the other. I can’t carry you from the nesting doll to the self, or from the boat to the life – you have to get yourself there.

I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it.

Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.”

— from Maggie Smith’s, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful”

Every few months, I find myself in this place where I wonder for a little while what the point of being a writer is. And I don’t even specifically mean as a career. I literally just mean being “a person who writes”. To understand themselves and the world around them, as they experience it.

Why, exactly, do I do this? Why is writing The Thing I’ve just… always done? And what do I actually believe it’s accomplishing – distilling my thoughts, perspectives, connections, and even some of my fuck ups and major life changes into paragraphs of words that sometimes other people read? 

These paragraphs of words are being written down on a pristine late summer Saturday morning, from the back deck of a farmhouse outside Nashville. Overlooking an abundant garden, I’m watching hummingbirds flutter and feed. There’s a spotted fawn cleaning himself in the morning dew. Last night was the first time I’ve slept through the night in weeks. Thank god.

The past few months felt like a slow accumulation of fog, and I’m on this deck this morning because I needed a strong, sudden dose of solitude to get back into my body. My stay here is only a day and two nights, but I can already feel the fog clearing.

I can feel it being steadily replaced by a full, slow, sweet sensation. Like molasses. Or the honey from my Beloved’s grandfather’s farm. It’s a warm, golden light. Thick and enveloping. Nourishing to my bones.

I know this sensation. My body remembers it suddenly. 

This is what stillness does.

This is how silence sounds.

This is what satisfaction feels like.

Thank god.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had an intense, overstimulating summer, and I cannot even begin to tell you how grateful I am for the arrival of September. And also how grateful I am to be back again, in my body, in this internal state. It’s the only reason I’m able to write this letter to you right now, honestly.

Because when I’m activated and overwhelmed, I don’t write. Correction: I can’t write. Luckily, I know enough at this point in my relationship with my body to be able to notice when I’m avoiding writing and take that seriously as a sign to slow down. To come home.

This time, coming home required a lot of truth-telling, to myself and to some of the people who really love me. It also required being told the truth a solid handful of times, by myself and by some of the people who really love me. And as hard as both of those were at moments, I am so unbelievably grateful for every oppressively humid second of what was (poetically) the final summer I’ll be spending in Tennessee. After 11 years.

How do I even begin to distill into these paragraphs of words what this heat has taught me, how it has shaped me in ways I never would have chosen but, apparently, deeply needed?

How it has been everything from a gauntlet to a challenge to an invitation, depending on the day – but the content of the call never changes: Can you stay present to this sensation? Can you breathe through this discomfort? Can you choose your body, even in this feeling?

Eleven years of remembering and then forgetting and then remembering again. Eleven years of leaving and coming home. In many ways, this place taught me how to breathe. By inviting me to struggle through my inhale every summer. And now I’ll never forget to remember that my breath is all I’ll ever need.