Ink and shadows share a common ancestry

I think poetry is an act of translation.

I thought about this after choking on my high school French as I engaged with the owner of this tiny sweet crepe and coffee shop I recently discovered in my neighborhood, one of the many businesses that have sprung up in the pandemic like mushrooms after the rain. Something about tasting the nuances of our different native languages as we wove them together strikes me as a particularly naked experience - ripples of pink embarrassment when I run out of knowledge, admittance of dreams deferred by reality, to explore and be explored by an encounter with foreign landscapes. Would I even recognize myself on the streets of Paris? What parts of myself would be revealed to me when removed from my context? Am I attracted to his foreign-ness or his openness in the face of it, the way the angle of the sun makes his brown eyes look like gold or amber, or maybe that he is about to hand me something delicious?

Poetry exists in the aftermath of the exchange, as much as it did in the experience of it. The residue of noticing the fleeting shadows and transitions, minute shifts in our perception that hold their own effervescent gravity, where the words used to mark them become pregnant with meaning before being washed away by the next rhythm of needs and realities asking us to respond.

Thresholds of emergence

During the summer of 2020, in the midst of the Pandemic, a bad situation finally broke. Like a storm, a drenching sigh of relief after the build up, fraught like a headache from the increased barometric pressure and the static shock of touching everything because the positives and negatives in the atmosphere are all fucked up and you can't brush your hair or get dressed or touch your animals without being reminded the something is coming. Being hyper prepared can be as impotent as being zero prepared it turns out.

I was riding my bike out to Bayridge, Brooklyn everyday for two weeks in august, to finish the mural I had developed with the students before the schools shut down. An hour each way, through Hassidic and Italian neighborhoods, the morning ride smelled like rugelach pastries and the evening ride home smelled of calamari. The morning I finally pulled the plug on this relationship nightmare, I remember whipping through Prospect Park, from top to bottom on my way to paint and being flooded with all of the rich shades of green, and so many verdant smells, too many to count or name. It felt like a revelation I've been chasing for years, through studying art and later meditation and finally falling in something like love - what it was to be filled with my own experience.

I only recently started gaining access to the heavy combination of tired and sad that I'm realizing is Grief. A lifetime of previously ungrieved moments have overwhelmed me while I desperately try to figure out how to deal with everything coming up and in the process I'm also discovering the previously elusive concept of Self-Care. Something I had always associated with obsessive pampering by people who could afford to prioritize getting their nails and hair done, or endless venti starbucks frappes, or like my mother, who always needed a latte, but the quality never mattered, it could be the locally roasted kind made by an artisan or from Dunkin Donuts for all she could fathom - and especially in the pandemic its been on blast in every instagram ad and hashtagged on every yoga person's post like its a permanent lifestyle for the unoppressed and people who aren't familiar with real stress or hard work. But in the waves of mourning that rock me daily, I've discovered how incredibly stabilizing it can be to let everything go, take my dog for a walk, ask someone to make me a coffee while I stand there, tender as a bruise, held by small acknowledgements and familiar motions - and just how important it can be to go sit in an empty forgotten park with my dog on a bench, writing or speaking into the wind, as my thoughts and feelings bubble up into the space I've made for them to be witnessed, tasted, explored in the sunshine.

The students that I work with are doing the same thing, and I am helping create a space for all of those things to transpire both verbally and artistically, and I'm slightly embarrassed that I have prioritized that experience for everyone but myself. And as I am starting to understand the shape and flavor of my grief, I'm hearing all the different ways it is manifesting for these students - some talk about sadness, or disappointment, or anger, in big ways and in tiny moments - and somehow the word Grief seems too small and distant to contain the richness of the experience. A 2 dimensional word for a labyrinthine process that I am only in the beginning of my journey through. Who am I to offer guidance to them along their paths through similar and different swampland? How do I hold my own process while also trying to help them hold theirs? If I have a history of pushing my own needs aside to hold others, how do I do this work safely, or not see my reflection in all of their experiences, rather then be the mirror they need at the developmental stages they are currently swimming in?

Maybe it isn't about holding at all.

Maybe there is some clue in my bike ride through a million shades of green, which left in their wake the heightened awareness of my capacity to be filled by them briefly and none of the weight of carrying any individual shade with me. Maybe its about becoming more adept at something other then growing dense with gravity, like everything is somehow my responsibility to carry with me. A gross misallocation of muscles that has shaped my body and responses and lenses and sense of selfness. Fleshy distractions and a confusion of resources like an emotional and developmental synesthesia left over from becoming an adult too soon.

I guess the shades of green and grief are not me. The capacity to be filled and then emptied of them however... maybe that's the real story.