Isn't the moon dark too

We now conclude this brief mental break with a word from/for our friends and body.

Forgive me, being quiet like this. I’ve been a little bit losing my mind.
Maybe you have too.

David Shrigley

In 2018, Patricia Lockwood wrote in an essay called How (the fuck) Do We Write Now:

“The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless…”

These past few months there have been days—despite the birds, the light, the love in my life—I have struggled to see a window. Days the phone becomes my brain, the computer becomes my brain, my brain becomes a firehose of horror, cheap hahas, disinformation, all the work I need to do, all the work I need to get to make a living that allows me some semblance of autonomy, my beautiful, miserable spreadsheets, celebrity sex crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the humanities being defunded before the police, memes made by teens, teens frightened by frown lines and unafraid of death, Eternal September, everything that’s ever happened, and I struggle to know which thoughts are mine and which have been put there by an algorithm that would rather I buy something I don’t need than try to help myself or others.

It’s hard to write when it’s hard to think. Some days it’s felt less like cognition than a nuclear meltdown up there, like my reactors are boiling over and my skull might catch forever fire and wouldn’t that be a relief? Sometimes after 2-3 days with the same slow pulsing pain in my temple I hear a low ringing in my left ear, it’s almost pleasant. I am looking for a therapist, it’s harder than it sounds. In the meantime, I’ve spent the last month clawing myself out of a hot hole in the ground. Here is what I think has helped:

Everything.
Even the weeping. Probably especially that.

Moving slowly into my body. Morning mobility. Joining a yoga studio for the first time in five years. Leaving the house and the screens behind for 90 minutes at a time to breathe with other people. Bedtime stretching. Responsible hydration. Five to twenty-three forehead kisses for the dog every day. The sun on my face. Walking. Walking more than that.

Reading poems and loving poets. In Surreal Life, again, for the fifth time.

Taking care to eat my vegetables. Not too much meat. Making groceries last. Limiting waste. Taking my vitamins. Magnesium, elderberry, ashwaganda, lion’s mane crushed into dust and bundled into pills I can swallow two at a time. Are they working? Am I better yet?

I worked on a project for over a year that launched in September which I’m terribly proud of, and grateful for. We talked about healing constantly. What we sometimes think it’s supposed to look like, how it actually feels and works—different for every person, often painful, never linear. This work re-arranged my brain and kicked up some old dust, sent me spiraling facefirst into contact with Every Wound Left in Me I Hated to Name and Thought I’d Left Behind. How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. I have spent many days these past months feeling foolish and small, helpless, my god some days hopeless, frustrated by the tediousness of my own mind, furious at cruelty almost more so at indifference, ashamed at my fragility, terrified this might just be how I am now, struggling to imagine other possibilities. I have felt ugly and messy and afraid.

And I’ve had to return to those conversations about healing, I’ve had to try to remember what I’ve learned, what I know—I’ve needed to feel it, all of the feelings, awful as they’ve been. I’ve needed to be curious and patient with them, enough to say what they are, and—this part is wretched and really sucks—I’ve needed to find a way to talk about them, write about them, get them outside of my crowded mind. Every time I have, it’s taken a brick off my chest. Offered relief, made a new inch of space to consider the possibility that maybe I’m not broken at all. Maybe I, like every other living thing on earth, am a part of something massive and miraculous and occasionally, often, profoundly violent. Maybe I, like every other soul on earth, have a wound that’s hard to see. It could be we’re all aching, and wouldn’t that be something, if everyone everywhere has a bit of hurt they’ve not yet found the words for, or they have, and no one’s listened, or someone heard, but did not care.

I was sitting on Nermin’s floor in Chicago a few months back, eating pizza and drinking tea with her and Nick, who said:

“I always assume everyone’s in ten times more pain than they’re able to share, and I go from there.”

What if I did too? What if rather than sit here silently lost in and losing my mind just a little bit for months, I found my way back into my body and my words and remembered what I know—there is no suffering alone—and said, “Hi, I’m sorry, I’ve been somewhat unwell, in the expected ways, maybe you understand.” I think you do.

What if I took a picture a cool cloud and asked if anyone knew why it was like that and Angel phoned a friend with a PhD in clouds and they said it’s called a lenticular cloud, it’s what happens when a storm cloud gets caught on a mountain and another cloud forms around it. And then they said, get this, “Sometimes mountains are so big they make their own weather.”

Anyway. Hello. I’m trying to remember to look out a window.

This is a metaphor, of course. I spend hours looking out windows. These days looking at waxwings, 17-20 at a time, picking the small, rotting fruit from the pear tree out back. At the feeders are juncos, chickadees, bushtits and wrens, nuthatches, robins, sometimes flickers and downy woodpeckers. All the passerines love my tasty seed. There’s a sharp-shinned hawk growing bolder nearby, I love the look of him flying, and fear for the small birds, the slow ones, though I know too there’s a rhythm to the world and the animal eats. I’ve seen it. Coyotes before sunset trotting down the road. Ravens big as big chickens. The crows, the crows, the crows. It’s been a minute since a vulture. I keep my eyes to the skies.

Despite all the crushing depression and anxiety, I’ve been making what I can—food, plans, short films with friends. Here’s one Katrina, Jared and I made together a few months back for the Big Teeth Small Shorts 2024 Film Fest in Chicago—60 minutes, 60 films. It’s a minute that didn’t exist on earth before and now it does, because we made it, together, as best as we could, and we love it. It’s a joy to share it.

It’s easy enough to share the sweet bits. Hey guys I saw some birds and considered compassion, also here’s a poem. Easy. It’s harder to say I’ve been frightened, furious, and frail—it is not exactly how I want to be, but it’s how I’ve been, and it’s changing, because everything does in time. Everything. Even the weeping. Maybe writing gets easier again, maybe thinking does too. I’ll keep trying. It’s all I can do.

Also here’s a poem I can’t stop reading.

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Why Are Your Poems So Dark

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

Linda Pastan

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