"Kneeling before a locked door"

Thank you, as always, for your support, readership, witness, feedback. So many of you email me and comment saying that my writing is giving you a way to “turn around” (see below) and this keeps me going. I am so grateful.

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“I had been kneeling before a locked door, peering through its keyhole into a single room. When I finally turned around, the whole world was behind me.”

-Melissa Febos

I am in an on-my-knees moment in many ways. So are a baffling number of people around me. Just today I got texts from one friend who had a panic attack so acute (or was it a migraine?) that she ended up in the ER and another who has uncovered devastating deceit with her cofounder. Last week I talked to a dear friend who has had not one, but two kinds of cancer, in the last couple of years. That same day I spoke to another longtime friend who left her job, despite the threat of financial insecurity, because she has been sidelined and experienced micro-aggressions and illegal labor practices for years on end and couldn’t take it anymore.

This isn’t the beginning of a conspiracy theory, don’t worry. But it is the beginning of an exploration—what unites these very different women and what can lead us to turn around and see the whole world behind us?

What unites us is we are American women living through midlife reckoning simultaneous to a national (and even planetary) reckoning of epic proportions. Patriarchy and racism are backlashing with a chaotic and tyrannical vengeance in our climate, in our courts, in our legislatures, in our workplaces, in our doctors’ offices, in our most intimate lives. Is all of this connected? Yes, I believe in my bones that it is. Again, not a conspiracy, but an interconnected ecosystem—fractals of dehumanization and deceit, trauma and terror, illness and endurance. As goes the country, goes our communities. As goes our communities, goes our families. So many of us feel stuck in a nightmarish scenario of one kind or another. Other may feel temporarily spared, but like they’re staring down any number of apocalyptic futures (my friend shared this one on this morning’s early morning hike.)

So what do we do when we’re on our knees? Well, I for one, am listening to a lot of Tara Brach, leaning hard into my ragtag meditation practice, and trying to move my body with other people. I’m trying to slow the fuck down, disinvest from the swirl of damaging stories, and connect with what is real. This morning I finally got to the zumba class at the local junior high gym, and even though I was half a beat behind on every move, I marveled at the balding man with the fingerless gloves who couldn’t seem to find his hips and the old, thin woman covered in tattoos who smiled the whole time. I met a friend at IKEA on Saturday and bought her an orchid, and every kind of dessert and it was less than $10, and we sat for three hours and talked about how broken we feel and how grateful we are to have one another and our spiritual practices, as quirky and messy as they may be. I found the sermon at church on Sunday underwhelming, but there was one man a couple of pews in front of me with a face so lined and tender that I decided I had come just for him, just to see his face and the light that beamed from it. There is still light.

When you are your knees—both in the intimate and political contexts—you discover that words won’t save you. This has also been the sermon of my dad’s dementia. What saves you is breath, tenderness, the accompaniment that comes from true friendship, your own indefatigable imagination, making things. I got a big soapy pail of water yesterday and cleaned patio furniture for an hour and it felt like praying. I unfolded parchment paper to reveal some flowers I’d dried back in the spring and started arranging them on a piece of cardboard. I cooked some soup and then fed my mom and big brother a modest dinner.

I know our politics won’t be fixed by the perfect words either; only making people feel seen and heard and part of something, like even modest soup, will get us back to understanding our collective inheritance, obligation, and potential with one another as a country. Less words, less speed, more stillness and food and solidarity and singing.

In case you can’t tell, I don’t know how to fix the country and I don’t know how to fix my life. I am learning, instead, how to move more gently within it—this liminal hell I’ve found myself in where I can’t heal the people I love. I can’t cure my dad, nor hasten his death, but I can eat jelly beans with him in the sunshine and marvel at the Monarch butterfly. Last week I rested my head on his shoulder so long that he kissed the top of my head, like some threadbare neuron remembered that I was his baby girl for just that one brief instant. It felt like a miracle.

My friend Neela has taught me that even tragedies are often miracles (she’s a pediatric palliative care oncologist so she knows of what she speaks). The tragedy that is our nation right now is the only thing that will lead to whatever is next, and yes, I stubbornly and naively hope that whatever is next is more human and kind and fair, but I’m sort of taking a sabbatical from hope right now. I am wondering what is beyond hope, what is possible if we give up in a sacred way, if we stay still for a moment, if we feel our grief. I wish it never came to this, but it did. Here we are—our climate in crisis, our caregivers and farmers ripped from their families, our most intimate relationships festering with unhealed traumas, our elders suffering and dying. How will we stop looking through the keyhole and turn around? How will we see the miracle that is our own agency?

My subconscious has been hard at work to remind me of my own courage and genius. I woke from a dream a couple of weeks ago with a fully formed theory of human development in my brain. I had met a man in the dream who said, “Life is shaped like a pinball machine. You bounce off of a handful of core people in your life, and each of these people force you to ask a deep and unique question of yourself. If you ignore the question, you end up in maelstrom; if you explore it fully, you evolve. This is how you continue to become who you are meant to be.”

Then last night I dreamt that my laptop went sliding down a giant mountain and I watched it go, like my obligations were floating away on a river and I had no control and that was good and right.

As I stand up and turn around, slowly and gingerly, I am writing this letter to you—friends and strangers who would probably be friends. I am reminding you that you are not alone in being on your knees, you are not alone in outgrowing the keyhole that is your current vantage point, you are not alone as your knees creak and you stand tall and swivel around to see what miracle this tragedy could become if you just look far enough along the horizon line. I am with you—dipping the cloth into the now dirty water in the pail, going to the protest with my homemade sign, crying everywhere I drive, holding my husband’s hand in the dark, holding my dad’s hand in the light, listening to the voice text from my fierce friend, meditating badly, longing for a more gentle mycelial season.