After the Storm
Negotiating Spaces Unlit
Easy sigh of morning in the Coast Range. I’m sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. It isn’t very good, but a big container of the stuff migrated over here from Mom’s memorial celebration last summer, and I’m by god going to drink it. Although I usually come here with an impossible To-Do List, my job on this trip is to rest. And last night I did. Rested even though the deep night weather changed dramatically. Flicker of high lightning. Thunder grumbling eight seconds distant. I slid carefully through the dark house and into the yard. Moon should have been near full and ivory high, but she was painted over by the storm. Back to bed. My job was to rest, not mull, not worry, not solve. Brief sleep then thunder-wakening. Patter of rain on the metal roof. Black air came alive, began breathing, a cool soothe drifting through the open window, caressing my brain. To rest. To sleep.
Now a wet smell morning after last night’s smidgeon of rain. A morning of summer grass still tawny, short-cropped as cougar hair but no longer crunchy. A morning heavy with overcast breathing low onto the ridges, held above the valley floor by upwardly spiraling exhalations of Swainson’s Thrushes, perhaps their last of the season. A morning of Douglas-fir boughs slouching under their new load of lemon-lime cones. Douglas Squirrel is excited about this year’s cone crop and chatters to the wingbeat rhythm of Vaux’s Swifts skittering like airborne cigars beneath the overcast.
California Ground Squirrel hunches and stretches, hunches and stretches, making her fitful way across the clipped grass. She is the size of a Western Gray Squirrel but without the silvery elegance. She pauses, rises up on her haunches to nibble a dandelion bud, kissing it to her face with both hands. This may be the same ground squirrel who two years ago I live-trapped out of the blueberry patch and transported seven miles west of here, only to find her back on her home burrow a week later chattering in defiance. My respect is cautious, maybe a little grudging. She hasn’t touched the blueberries since.
Many of you know what happens when I sit in this place with eyes, ears, nose, and heart open. My pen spots an opening and begins to ink its way inside. To the deeper places where the lit and unlit reside. To places even deeper than these. A month or so ago, my friend and writing partner Kirsten Steen nudged me over to author Elizabeth Gilbert’s free-writing exercise. The prompt? Love, what would you have me know today? Five minutes. Keep the pen on the paper. No judgement. (Find out a lot more about Gilbert’s philosophy and strategy on this Good Life Project podcast and at her Substack “Letters from Love.”). Although Gilbert’s personal query is to an external intelligence, for me this is a request to my deepest intuition. This was how last night I understood that on this trip to the old family house in the Coast Range my job is to rest.
Other astonishments have surfaced five minutes at a time (this also happens to be a good match for my attention span). Many of those words wait folded inside my journals until after that last exhalation and my ashes are growing big trees on the ridge. Not everything is meant to be shared. One shard of enlightenment surfaced that I don’t mind sharing—a newfound acceptance of my internal darkness. After years of believing that expunging my dark places was a path of personal progress, I’m coming to realize that living my best life will be like a forest walk on a sunlit day. Scatter of light on leaf and needle. Bend and stretch of shady places as Sun traverses the southern sky. Tree-trunk moss blooming on the shaded north side. Cloud-strewn heavens infinitely more interesting than a featureless blue vault. As the images and metaphors spill out, the idea of a life filled entirely with light becomes downright horrifying.
This morning’s gray gauze hanging on the mountains is a solemn reminder that embracing my emotional complexity comes with other challenges. One of them is to demarcate those shadows as clearly as possible. Like everything else in the universe, shadows have fuzzy edges that will always defy our best efforts to compartmentalize them. Nevertheless, my darkness has at times metastasized into an insidious gray haze that spread into every part of my life. This is the psychological netherworld of depression.
Role models are helpful. I love Banana Slugs, and they have become both an aspiration and aversion in this endeavor. Some individuals have sharply delineated black spots that are my darkness well-defined. However, I need to steer clear of that formless goo that serves a Banana Slug so well by lubricating its slow glide across the brittle twigs and needles of the forest floor. Never mind that the stuff is also mildly toxic.
My blackness isn’t homogeneous, but dazzling in its complexity, shadows cast by a diverse array of sources. Some are externalities imposed by circumstances beyond our control. For example, my paternal lineage seems to have been near the back of the line when they were handing out the genes related to serotonin, that wonderful feel-good brain chemical. Even though I can manage some of these genetic outcomes my DNA can’t be fixed. Many folks on my maternal side have shouldered the burden of transgenerational trauma imposed by the person who settled in these wet coastal mountains. He was both an excellent provider and a child-beating tyrant. None of his descendants asked for this historical reality. We just deal with it. By demarcating these black places as clearly as I can, new paths appear. There is the possibility of an empathic conversation with myself. There can be forgiveness in that bone-truth sense of letting go. Perhaps the most profound truth lies in knowing that beneath this dance of darkness and light lies a more fundamental me.
Of course all of this goes WAY beyond my allotted five minutes of free-writing. And yet that spill of black ink onto white journal pages has primed the process in remarkable ways. It’s like a Love hack into a curriculum of personal enlightenment. Lovely readers, I wish I knew where this twisting two-track road is headed, but that adventure is yet to unfold. Even though my family doesn’t backtrack well, for now I need to return to the immediacy of the morning. A golden moment that looks a lot like lead. An easy breeze gentling the trees on the ridge and stirring the overcast, a nudge that sends fine mist falling onto the parched meadow, like dust gone over to the dark side. I can feel the moisture on the contours of my face. Taste it in the veined backs of my hands. Last night’s lightning was miles off. There will be no fires. Not today. I can rest easy.
Thank you, Tom. I honor your dark and find this wonderful piece speaks to my own.
Oh. This is so beautiful.
I feel rested now, too.