Month: September 2024

“Well, ma’am, you know what Archimedes always said?” asked Justin via phone, a man I’d met 30 minutes prior through Facebook Marketplace in my efforts to sell a long-unused 6-foot heavy wood and metal martial arts training equipment filled with sand called a Wooden Man. 

While working out the transaction details, Justin told me at length about his struggles with work, recovery, holding down a job, getting an ADHD diagnosis and meds to help – all part of why buying this equipment felt so important to him to help him get back on track in his life.  The logistics of this sale were tricky – requiring me to perfectly time a pit stop 3 hours into a 6-hour road trip to pick up my kids from a spring break adventure they were on. And if Justin were to flake on me, as so many do on Facebook Marketplace, there would be no room in the car for my kids’ suitcases and beach gear on the drive back and the Wooden Man would have to be abandoned between a Cracker Barrel and an Exxon in Charlotte, NC. 

“No ma’am, I’ve got the cash. I’ve set my alarm set and I set a second alarm my ex-girlfriend gave me. I will be there,” Justin reassured me.  If he wasn’t the good person he turned out to be, he might have simply lied in wait behind that Cracker Barrel until he saw a harried, angry middle aged lady wrestle a large sand filled leviathan out of the back of her Telluride and heave it bitterly towards the dumpster.

But he wasn’t. Justin was a good egg, responding good naturedly when I called back to say I’d hit a snag – I didn’t have the upper body strength to hoist it into the back of my car.

“Well, ma’am, you know what Archimedes always said?”

I love it when my own latent snobbism is called to the mat, giving me another shot at scrubbing it.  I didn’t expect this young man, who already had lived through such challenges by his early 20’s, to tell me about Archimedes. 

“No, I don’t. What did he say?”

Justin went on pleasantly. “Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever and fulcrum and I can move the world.’ And ma’am, you can almost always find something to use as a lever.  Just look around your garage – plywood, cardboard.” He paused and drew a big dramatic breath, “You’d be AMAZED by what you can do with cardboard!!!”  

I could tell there was a real excitement and energy there about cardboard – probably a couple of great stories about feats of impossible human strength pulled off by broken down Amazon boxes, but I felt the need to hurry off the phone with this new information and inspired advice and give it a go.

“It worked! Go, Archimedes!” I texted 10 minutes later and he shot me back a thumbs up and what appeared to be a Parthenon emoji with the reply, “Fuck yeah!!”  I told a friend about it all laughingly at dinner that night and she told me it’s only a good story once I made it back safely and insisted I drop a pin of the meetup Exxon. But Justin made good on the rendezvous the next day and now, months later, it’s nice to imagine him whaling on that Wooden Dummy after work as a security guard in Raleigh, saving up for his own place and dreaming about big shit he can move with some extra heavy cardboard and an ingeniously-placed fulcrum. 

While I was sliding that cardboard between the car and the Wooden Man back in March, I think there was a flattened refrigerator box being slid between me and my world.  

Like a lever on a really stable and big fulcrum, it was a subtle lift and shift – one that I wouldn’t feel for months, not until the dizzying excitement that I’d left the ground and was gently being put down in a slightly new place.  Transitions are like that.  I had looked up Archimedes quote and thought it interesting – debates about translations aside – that a fuller version read: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

I’ve become expert at cramming tiny spades and butter knives into nooks to try to move what’s heavy or stuck and needs adjusting in my world. It’s sometimes successful, sometimes not.  But oh, the long lever! That’s where the real movement happens and requires so much positioning, aligning, and fully addressing the weight of the thing to be moved. 

Just before the spring break road trip – Facebook marketplace adventure, a dear friend came to visit and I sat on the couch with her and described the subterranean reservoir of lonely I was feeling.  It was as though I was standing at the shore of its dark, deep waters – all I had lived and lost and thought would be my future contained inside, and it was so vast and so dark I couldn’t see the banks of the other side, any other possible reality.  How do you move a lake?

With a lever long enough. 

I think the first positioning of that lever must have been in being willing to talk about the Big Sad of that feeling – with safe friends over the past couple of years. You have to take an honest and accurate measure of the heft and size of what you want moved. And then once it’s in place, and you’ve opened your heart to possibility, to movement, and leaned all your body weight into it, it’s patience.  God, I resent and hate this so much. Will I ever learn to be patient? (Will I? When? When? When????).  In the movement of big things with long levers, nothing  happens for the longest and it all looks like stagnancy and failure and flies buzzing and sore shoulders for the effort.  

Then a shift.  The kind where you can tell, you’ve got the underbelly of the thing – not grazing a slippery side – but the very seat of it. 

My lake isn’t moved, but it’s moving. I’m not naïve enough to think that it will never not be a reservoir — the edges of its banks rising and falling with my heart – but what’s changing is its placement and its tributaries in and out. It’s moving from the stagnancy of a crater lake  to one fed by rivers and streams. The long lever has shifted the pain and loneliness to something that also contains possibility and hope. 

Timing, patience, willingness to lean one’s shoulder into a herculean effort – these are necessary for lake-moving, but so is paying attention and meaning making. To move something, we have to imagine its shape-shifting possibility as well as our own possibility to be willing and hopeful and vulnerable enough to make a fervent little wish.  This isn’t possible when we are in the tunnel vision of pain. In Something in the Woods Loves You Jarod Anderson writes about how meaning-making is a creative collaboration between us and our relationships with others or nature that has true generative power to leverage our lives.  The act of seeing meaning in a great heron spreading its impossibly long wings over the water in flight is a creative collaboration between the heron showing up and our own imagination to connect this witnessing to our life’s burdens and hopes. 

Anderson says if we don’t think a heron is magic, we need to broaden our definition of that word, as he breaks down the avenues to get there: 

“There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron. 

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.”

I think for me, and maybe this is true for you too, that honey of meaning is required fuel to keep going when something is being moved by a long lever.  It’s sustaining and gives hope and tiny encouragements. It’s why I write. It’s why I walk the trails behind my house up to the highest spot and look at the mountains.  Those old blue brontosaurus-backed mountains are showing up for me, and I’m seeing in them the meaning I need to keep going, keep imagining, while the long lever does its slow lake-moving work.

“Go Archimedes!”

“Fuck yeah!”

“Ah, there’s the sorrow,” said the boy Liam as we passed the car wreck with the ambulance and two cop cars by the side of the road, “I knew there was one coming today, but didn’t know where it was.”

Liam, newly 8 years old, is the boy we picked up every morning for a week last summer to carpool to my youngest son’s nature camp out in the country. I did mornings, his folks did evenings, saving each other a precious hour each day and a lot of mileage, and gaining some pretty good conversation. 

“The sorrow?” I asked. Such an old, lonesome word for this chipper, snaggle toothed boy with his fidget spinners and slime and camp backpack.  And did he really say “Ah” at the start with just a whiff of a wistful old Irish lilt?

“Yes,” he said solemnly, “a sorrow.”  

“But how did you know you would see a sorrow?” 

“Because I saw two crows this morning. So, you know, I knew there would be a sorrow today. I thought the sorrow was when my dogs ran out the front door this morning and I cried and didn’t think we’d get them back. But that wasn’t it.”

He paused meaningfully.   “It was the wreck.”

I like this accounting of sorrows. Two crows = One sorrow. No more. Exacting, precise, reassuring both in its historical recounting (it wasn’t the dogs, they came back and that was all fine) and in its future predicting (no more sorrows to worry about today!)  Liam leaned a little further back in his booster seat and confidently pulled out his newest fidget spinner and began speculating on whether they’d make forts or fires that day.

As I took on the snakey curves of the country road that would eventually empty us by the clear Moorman river at the bottom of the Blue Ridge, I thought about how, too, this notion of crows heralding a sorrow that needed to be watched for, and ultimately, found and acknowledged might be another, less spoken of way to cultivate awareness in our lives.  

Life can be such a whirlwind of trying to control a yo-yo while riding a roller coaster – equal parts nauseating and thrilling  – that we spend a lot of time and energy trying to get quiet and still in efforts to stay in connection to ourselves and stop the room from spinning. At least I do. And in that stillness, there’s some well-meaning pressure to notice what’s good and lovely and loving in our lives.  Awareness is, after all, an antidote to the spin that dissociates us from each other and our own selves.  

But awareness might also be dispassionately but attentively acknowledging the sorrow. I feel in myself a resistance to this even as I type it. Several months ago, I was noticing this hollow feeling that comes to me as I drift off sleep and first wake up – a deep and lonesome missing of my own self. Missing my awareness to my life.  My dear friend and mentor Paula said simply, “it is so hard to wake up to our own lives.” And she’s right. I find it’s also not easy to remember that waking up requires not trying to put myself to sleep – in all the ways I numb myself with lullabies of work, wine, the internet.  My own children and their constant and complicated choreography of lessons and activities and plans, which seems essential, has a benedryll effect, submerging my consciousness just below the next pick up, the next meal prep. Even my seemingly self-reflective ruminations – a circular lullaby, just the chorus on repeat, spinning gauze around me.

In my better moments, I think of awareness as something to capture with effort and hustle, like a firefly. I try to catch hold of its tail as it’s flying past me in the blue gloaming light. I listen to my children’s breathing in the pre-dawn morning and ignore the call to get a little more work done on my laptop before they wake, in efforts to make up for the fact I will have to take away from work to drive them places later in the day. I work hard to spool the thread up against myself and sit on the couch with the dog to meditate, then journal.  Soon, though, I’m lost again to the laptop and the dishwasher. It’s no bad thing, this practice of trying to architect still moments to inhabit for a few minutes, before falling back in the maelstrom and doing it all over again.   And yet – I also think this jumps over something more gentle and more essential – the solemn naming of what we are experiencing – before chasing the enlightened calm.

I never lose this notion (and myself along with it) more than when my kids are experiencing pain.  My daughter has been battling – and defeating – her own demons like an Amazon.   But she, like anyone battling an enemy within, especially at the tender age of 16, grows tired and doubtful and weakens. The afternoons are particularly hard for her as her mood dips precipitously and everything “feels like shit.” I feel my own heart plummet like a lead weight to my shoes and any plans I had hoped to make fizzle as my mood dims alongside hers.  I didn’t acknowledge the sorrow – I became it, along with her.  I unzipped its ratty grey zipper and climbed inside, and worse – became resentful as we both ran out of oxygen in that sad sack that I couldn’t fix for her.   And while she’s far stronger now than summer before last – learning to just turn towards her pain, her sorrow, and acknowledge without action remains a lifelong effort.

Paula recently told me I am not turning towards my own grief, my own hollow, and giving it the attention it needs. I want Presence-to-Myself to be the rosy kind –  long quiet walks in some beautiful tick-free forest, a meditative labyrinth in a churchyard, a poem scratched out in my journal.  When so often Presence-to-Myself, to my life, is face down on the carpet or behind my own cupped hands – no expansive vista, no act of creation – just the act of turning towards something too big and lonely to name. “It’s okay,” she said, “to simply say, ‘This is hard. What I am living and feeling is hard.’”  

And even now, as there is a levening, a blessed lightening in my life – the accounting is the same. I have to remember to stay honest first with what I’m actually feeling before finding the silver lining. Two crows, it turns out – that is, if you go by the old rhyme* anyway, is joy.  ( I didn’t tell Liam that) But you’d only know that after counting and really seeing that first old bird. 

This is getting better at awakening, this is non-enmeshment, this is self-kindness and a lightening of the heart, from – hand to heart, a tiny man in a booster seat with a fidget spinner.  Awareness is joy, yes – but not without counting the crows.

Ah, there’s the sorrow. 

* Counting Crows Nursery Rhyme:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,
Eleven for health,
Twelve for wealth,
Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself.