Fresh grief comes in. 

A friend tells me more about another corner of the world and its suffering.

Suddenly strangers turn into the friend of a friend and the world is made small. So small. 

And the hurt is made large. So large. 

And I stop. I cry. I cry so often now. 

No one tells you how much being an adult is shedding tears for things you are powerless to change.

And I think to myself, "do I have room for this too?"

Surprisingly, the answer is "yes". Always yes. 

I will let this grief in. 

Grief stacked upon grief. 

A world hurting in a thousand ways becomes

A thousand worlds hurting in their own thousand ways. 

And I can do so little. 

They tell you to do "the work" but

They don't tell you how much "the work" is just holding the door of your heart open

Long after it is full to breaking. Broken and still filling.

Life happens stacked on top of death. Death on top of life. 

You can reduce your pain if you look away

Close your eyes, close your heart.

But your heart will shrink 

And you will know deep inside that the suffering is still there. Still there. 

And you, you have turned away

And added to it.

Today is one of those non day, days. I don't know how to explain it. One of those days where you watch yourself from outside of your body and wonder what it all means, if you make it through this season of your life, and who still sticks around for the next 10 years. You feel disconnected, disembodied. Unable to grapple with life's problems on the day to day level. Maybe this is just what happens when your spirit is too tired, too full up on the world's suffering. 

It feels like I'm stuck up in a mental tree, unable to come down and live because I have so many questions and the questions are how I got into the tree in the first place but there are no answers so I don't know if there is a way down. And I know that if there was someone in this room with me that they would ask some kind of question that should have an answer like "how have I dealt with this in the past?" or something. But the truth is, I just wait for this to pass. And I know that it will because it always does but that doesn't make the urgency any less or the abrasiveness of the questions any softer. Because I would love to have the answers.

Sometimes art is a way out of the tree. Sometimes I make things and sometimes I enjoy other people's made things. Sometimes art is a way into the tree. Today it was the way in. 

I'm listening to a book by V.E. Schwab. And it is perfect. It is lyrical and abstract and wrought with human emotion (mostly longing and different shades of suffering). It is exploring the importance of human connection. It is asking over and over again "does life matter if you cannot make a mark?" and again "does. life. matter." And everything in me wants to shout "yes" because I am cut from the same cloth as the author and we are dreamers and jaded optimists who have met our devils and live mostly to spite them. And hope is a grudge that I hold against my personal demons like a knife in a dark alley. It is small and just as likely to hurt me as an attacker if I don't use it correctly and woefully insufficient for so many types of conflicts, but it is there and sharp and better than nothing. And it is extremely useful in threatening away minor attackers like depression and self doubt. And you can bet that I clutch my hope knife with a stubbornness that has been known to unnerve those with larger, more efficient weapons because I am clearly out of my mind if I think I am winning any fights and, being out of my mind, self preservation might not be my goal which makes me unpredictable and unpredictable is dangerous. 

Anyways. 

The author is brilliant and my mind is spinning out in all of the directions of my life while carrying these themes of human connection and love and loss and purpose and hope. And it has lead me up into this mental tree where I sit examining my own life. Grieving the human connections that I've lost. And thinking about how this week so many people were killed by police while we awaited the Chauvin trial and when will we ever realize that we need each other? When will we all really know in our bones that we can't do this life alone and we have got to come together? And how do I move humanity closer to some sort of peace or hope or purpose? How could I possibly help when my own human connections are so complicated so full of lost loves and miscommunication that we just can't seem to clear up? How is possible to want so much better without being able to do any better?

And I sit in this tree looking down at my life. The family I've come from but don't know how to relate to anymore. The family I'm trying to build. This house and this garden with so many hopes that I'm terrified to admit more days than not because while hope is my knife in the dark alley, it works best if no one knows you have it until you need it. And I know I'm not really making sense. This is how it feels to be up in the tree. To be able to see the whole of everything but not be able to process or describe it. To feel the weight of how everything is connected and one decision made can be the fulcrum that moves you along a path you didn't know was an option, but knowing never makes it so you are be able to choose better. 

Most days, I would never want to know the future. And there are a thousand reasons for that. But today, today I don't remember any of those reasons and I would love to know who in 10 years is still an important part of my life, whether I am able to build the community in this neighborhood that I want to, if I am happy and loved. I walk through life with a certain amount of faith that makes it easier to keep putting one foot in front of the other. But on days like today, that faith deserts me and all I have is this deep longing to make something, to feel connected, to see how everything fits together. And it hurts because I am asking for things that I cannot have. I am too small to fit the whole world inside of me, much less to orient humanity towards our commonality. But I want to so badly. 

 I don't remember how to get down from this tree.

"Take Care of Your Self" by Sundus Abdul Hadi

Discovering AK press books has been a huge blessing and a huge rabbit hole for both time and money. So many radical topics that I've wanted to ask questions about and examine but that no one wants to talk about with someone like me who is only radical compared to my extremely conservative upbringing. Anyways, let the reading begin. I've started a few books from AK but I'm dropping everything and digging into "Take Care of Your Self" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because it's the shortest page count in my stack. 

Even the title causes a swirl of emotions. Responses to the words "take care of yourself" range from "Yes, tell me how!" to "take care of yourself because no one else is going to. Because if you can't name what you need, it will be your fault that you're hurt. Because if you ask for what you nee, they will tell you that you're asking too much." 

 And I guess I'm not alone in interacting with the title this way. The author seems to have similar experiences and yet still believe that care is the answer to the oppression we see in the world. Liberation is good too. But what do you do before and after liberation? You take care of yourself. You take care of your community. You let your community care for you. But creating spaces in which care can happen is actually much more difficult than it is to to talk about.  

This book was a beautiful look at why care is needed and how care is curated. Like art. Through art. How art takes care of us and how it helps us to have conversations that we may not feel ready for but desperately need to have. How art can make space in this world for those who feel like there is no space for them. How much more deeply we can care for ourselves and our community once we extend care far beyond bubble baths, vacations, and things you can buy. How care is truly and literally something you make with your hands and your heart.

At some point in our lives, our parents will fail us. I don't think my parents failed in especially huge or or unique ways, but I also couldn't call my childhood a success except that I am still here and still loving. Into the gaps left by our communities and families, some of us learn to stuff art to help with raising us. There are albums and poems and stories that fostered me when it looked like I had been left to fend for myself. These are now roots as deep and firm as anything else that raised me. In some ways, they are more real because they shaped my inner life and even as I drop off talking to my family to a few times a month, I carry that inner life at all times about to spill over and no living person can take credit for it. 

For example, Bradbury didn't send me his stories to keep my mind safe. He wrote them for his own curiosity. But Bradbury's work found me and saved a part of me that would have surely been lost if not for that meeting. U2 and Thrice didn't compose music for me. Joss Whedon didn't direct for me (and I'm not even sure I'd like him in real life). Emily Dickinson and Zora Neale Hurston wrote in their own time and places and died before my parents were born. None of these artists will ever know my name or the demons that they saved me from, but they saved me none the less. They raised me in the moments when I was left to raise myself. 

And I do mean "raise" in a literal if abstract sense. There are artists who you enjoy and there are works that raise you up. They did more than just educate me. They validated my experiences and my creativity. Bradbury was a shield against the assault of "reality" which was really just a small piece of a whole. Without him, I surely would have suffocated some vital piece of myself. The Beatles were much the same. And ever since then, I have been seeking out shields and props to keep my inner life from getting beaten down and trodden upon. This world is only too ready to do that. 

I've added to their number over the years. Paulo Coelho, Anne Lamott, Nayirrah Waheed, Joy Harjo, Bell Hooks, Asimov, Neil Gaiman, capoeira, Jose Bonino, Oscar Romero, Gregory Porter, Janelle Monae, Laura Mvula and so many others. I don't know who I would be without them. And that's humbling to think about.