On “Watering People”
A phrase that stuck with me after a friend offered it. She then asked me, “Who waters you?” A response in vignettes.
At night, when the automatic grow lights click on and turn the apartment windows into terrarium-like other-worlds, I am safe within my quiet cocoon. The Jazz is across the world, where I will join him in no time, but for now, I relish this chilly alone. I sip the immune boosting soup I cooked up on the stove. A book slowly blows my mind. I fill the apartment with songs that make my heart tingle. I add only the photos to my album of inspiration that take my breath away. If it doesn’t cause a gasp, it just isn’t right for me. Simple test. Me and the plants, this week we have enjoyed our evenings just being alive together.
When The Jazz was patiently teaching me how to water the verifiable jungle in our crib the other week, a bit nervous to see if I’d live up to the task during his travels, he laughed — “you don’t need to perfect the water like you’re giving them a bath!”
And indeed, I snapped into the realization that I was holding my fingers under the tap, exactly as if preparing for the skin of a newborn!
Then I thought: this is all wrong. The plants are not babies. An approximation of a sensation ran through my throat: a memory. A cold drink of water on a hot day. That is more what it’s like, I thought. Not freezing, not warm. Give these plants a cool rain.
Inviting our community to celebrate a loved one’s recent freedom (the details don’t matter, but the gesture I invite you to steal as your own), I asked for any combination of the following to be shared:
An experience of freedom: One place you go to experience a sense of liberation or freedom in NYC, with instructions on how to enjoy the landscape. Alternatively, one thing you do, regardless of location.
A depiction of freedom: Share a link to one song or reading that makes you feel a sense of liberation or freedom.
Words of care: Any other kind words you wish to offer.
What arrived in response were (literally) poems, songs, poetic bits of advice and admiration, and (figuratively) candy, honey, salve, medicine, a home cooked meal — again, that tall glass of cool water.
And I am watered, too. Quite literately, often in the form of tears. For me, it’s really the only form of motivation that I should bother to cultivate: to feel good, by which I mean to feel more like myself, and through that embodied experience, to help others feel good, too, by which I mean more themselves.
On Twitter when someone known dies — someone who is shared by the collective (a scene, the world) — so many missives are launched into the internet’s sprawling neural network that echo one another, each tumbling over the other in a scramble to acknowledge — a self conscious gesture of helplessness, and also sort of absurdly, but forgivable, an outcome of group think’s flattening effects.
What is the most generous interpretation of anyone’s any given action? A good practice, but only if you actually stop to think about it. Too fast to act, you’re a sucker, and I’ve only come to realize this through tons of personal experience.
With some distance from social media, I experience this public mourning with a sense of cognitive dissonance. Shooting off a memorial tweet into a sea of mini-diatribes on late trains, shitty pizza, political dramas, #MeToo takedowns, Granny’s dancing poorly on Tik Tok, thinly veiled gripes about colleagues and #toxicworkculture... is Twitter not among the least sacred of spaces? Might some even call it a cesspool?
But in another way: what a fascinating microcosm. Any one who has ever suffered a close loss can attest to the funhouse mirror quality of your own world collapsing inward while the salmon stream around you keeps racing forward. It is shocking, confusing and hurtful, how the larger world just continues on as is.
“Grief has a sound, a sound that embarrasses the repressed and offends the oppressive; grief is the sound of being alive.”
This is a quote from Martín Prechtel that I sent to my friend after she called me today, her voice pouring rain when I answered the phone.
The word itself is starting to get soggy, but look beyond it. Tend to your liberation as if giving a baby a bath. As if, after a long sleep, the relief of a cool glass of water.
Sometimes when my anxiety spins out of control, I just repeat, you are safe inside my head, while breathing with my eyes closed. In a film I watched, the main character said in a guided meditation: “plunge deeper into yourself.” What I think he meant by “yourself” is the ultimate self, the one who is in the big cosmic swirl. It was both a little creepy and completely magnetic.
It’s not that I believe I am fundamentally safe, but I can find some relief in knowing I am safe in the fact of being so fragile, so very unsafe, that one day, near or far, it will be lights out for me, too. I guess this is what is meant by the freedom found in facing your own mortality.
One day I’ll just plunge back into that deeper self. It’s peaceful there.
(But be careful with that sentiment, too.)
Two years ago Yarrow planted a single seed in the backyard and the passionfruit vines climbed and grew until they covered the entire view out the living room window, and then up, over the garden, where the string lights twinkle over Kenny, who is dancing.
“Close your eyes when you dance,” Kenny tells me, and what he’s saying is that when electrons are being watched, they behave differently. I shuffle the two step, eyes still open, I can’t help it, while Kenny uprocks and hustles, the moon bouncing off his heel and back into the sky.
Before the pandemic, I used to see people dancing all the time in public.
All the time!
I realize how much I miss this as a memory surfaces: I am watching a teenage girl and boy rap aloud on the train. The girl in particular is going hard, like really hard, hitting every word like a hammer coming down center head! She is deep lunging into the music, surfing the train’s shakes and turns, lifting her arms up like an astronaut falling off the face of the moon and — woooo! — floating through space! Punctuating the beat with dying stars. Like: YOU. WILL. SEE. ME. MOTHER. FUCKER. And mother fucker is like, God in this scene, if you know what I mean.
This is how I used to listen to music when I was a kid, too, I needed to merge with it like an oxygen supply. It gave me things I didn’t already have, like confidence, like swagger, like the sound of pain. But how I listen to music now, most often anyway, is not about owning a song for the possession of the experience, or to enmesh with it inappropriately, but to visit with it, to listen to what it has to say. To hang.
A text from Lins:
Reasons to love NY: acoustic guitar with subtle Spanish vocals on the train, and another dude laughing along to whatever the funny lyrics must be.
The New York City parks department started putting these signs on occasional trees that read: HUG ME!
When I was in a stuck depression a number of years ago, my friend brought me upstate, tended to my spirit, offered me care in the form of company, food and some of the healing practices he was giving a shot. It turned my life around. I got back on track. Not miraculously, but enough to propagate the desire to want to try again inside me.
One of his pieces of advice that never left me? Put your anxiety into the trunk of a thick tree, and ask the tree to take it, to shoot it down its roots, to convert it into energy and life. The earth can take it, in that way, she can. I knew immediately that he was right.
Tell me something about someone you love: a recent prompt in a storytelling workshop, paraphrased. My answer: My best friend teaches me through example to expand myself, but with less ego. Naming that helps me understand the direction in which I want to grow myself.
That same weekend a brilliant writer told me he cannot write without the television on in the background. Even during our free-write in the workshop, he was listening to a show! Ha!
Well, I thought to myself, you hear that? Stop judging yourself for how you create and just lean further in.
It’s not always the occasional vice that’s the problem, another friend said. It’s the guilt, the judgement and the making yourself wrong for it. If you’re going to do it, you best enjoy it while among the world of the living.
