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.