‘My own heart let me more have pity on'
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
Friends, I am very tired. From the misery of 2020 to the heartache of 2021 to the nightmare that marked the first few months of 2022, I have arrived at summer feeling burnt to embers.
Do not get me wrong: I cherish the life that gives me so much love, even when it demands all I have to give in return. I would not trade it. But I cannot shake this sheer exhaustion. My cup runneth empty.
The best thing I have ever published (I believe) is Loupe, which starts so:
Sometimes I say out loud to no one, “I am so tired.”
Sometimes I stop in the supermarket aisle, and press my hand hard to my heart, to blunt the ache.
My mother often sighed, out of nowhere, long and loud. I don’t think she meant to. I know the feeling of breath, of words, escaping your lips, like air from an untied balloon. She and I: untied balloons.
This is true. Every word of it.
I stepped away from this labor of love a few months back because the crises had reached a crescendo, and I could not spare a single moment for writing. (I did write a painful piece then, but it is still too raw to share.) And then things started to settle, tentatively and tenuously, and then some Real Happiness came my way (Rilke writes: "And we/who always think/of happiness rising/would feel the emotion/that almost startles us/ when a happy thing falls”), and I kept thinking that I would start writing again - about the neighbor with the barbed wire; about Ben, who arrived mid-maelstrom and didn’t run; about all the things that compel me to write - and then it just. wouldn’t. happen. And so the weeks passed.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
-Mary Oliver
And then this weekend, when I was pulled and shoved in a million directions, when all the voices cried “Mend my life!,” it came to me that I had to step back, that my writing reluctance was a message, that I need to focus on mending my own damned life for a bit. And writing is mending, for sure, but it also is giving, is offering, is bleeding onto the page. And I have nothing left to give right now.
I want to believe I will come back; that one day in the not-too-distant future I will run to my computer and the words will flow again. Just not yet. I need to let the stars burn through the clouds first. I need to save my own life.
Be well, friends. I will see you on the other side.
I was reminded of something I had read in college that always stayed with me: Writing is easy, you just open the vein and bleed. It's funny, I thought that quote was in a writing book called Tapping the Vein. But I just realized that title is a Clive Barker book which I have never read but also remember seeing around that time and I conflated the two. I suspect I also conflated the book Writing Down the Bones which probably has a similar quote in it. (All this is secondary to my first point, but I had fun sifting through old memories.)
Your words have their own lives, individually and collectively - whether they reach the page or reside in your own heart and mind. Thank you for sharing these words. Your caring spirit keeps my soul strong. I hope mine can do the same for you.