Today: keeping vows
“We’re all monks these days.”
That’s what my therapist said to me last Saturday as I picked my way across an open meadow, clouds scudding by above me. I’ve been doing walking therapy these days, over the phone.
“The question is, will we keep our vows? And what will those vows be?”
I read Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm for the first time at twenty years old. Dillard says that nuns and artists (and monks too, maybe) burn for what they serve. Moths, inexorably drawn in: “A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine.” It is hard, to see something so used, to watch the legs move and then curl, the antennae crumble, the wings sent away as ash. Dismissed.
This is pretty intense as a metaphor to live by, Greg, I want to say to my therapist. And doesn’t it just feel that way, today? Today, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. Today, people I respect announce that they will no longer vote. Today, New York reported its highest death toll in a single day. Today, I’m having a hard time feeling hope.
It is hard, to see vulnerable people so used by the representatives and institutions intended to care for them. This isn’t just an abuse of power — it is abuse. We all seem to be stuck in a fairy tale these days, a horrible curse that has put everyone to sleep, brought down a 100-year winter with no Christmas. A virus emerges, in this scenario, that seems almost mythic: children, by and large, don’t die; men die more than women; the elderly die more than most. Like the planet is engaged in clearing the board. We’re all remembering our David Foster Wallace now, which is to say remembering the truth: “this is water.” And what it means: we could drown.
How to be a monk in this scenario? I wonder if it isn’t like coming to accept that we are the moth: we aren’t here to win, necessarily. We’re definitely not here to live forever. We’re here to die but in the meantime, what? I find this moth so moving for the choice: all her verbs are active. She enters that fire and damn if she doesn’t plop her whole self right in the middle of that flame. To be lit from within with something bigger than yourself, to risk that, knowing that it means burning up? Knowing that we can’t keep going forever? Knowing that despair and loss and death are real, real as anything? Knowing that not a week ago our President suggested that people should be willing to die to save the economy? Knowing that not a few people nodded along?
Maybe it’s accepting what Greg calls “the booby prize.” Finding ways to celebrate moments and pleasures and the stuff of humanity. To be makers and creators. To mourn together. To not turn away. Today, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race and it feels like we’re done. I feel scared and powerless.
But that isn’t all. The moth that burned? The light continued: “She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning — only glowing within…while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.” This isn’t to suggest we should burn our lives away. It’s just to say that maybe there’s meaning in daring to engage that much and to do it with and for each other. Maybe we can extend the light past our own experiences and illuminate the lives of others. Maybe that’s really all that we can do, ultimately — choose to walk into fire for each other. Again and again.
And maybe keeping a vow doesn’t always have to be so dramatic. Partly, it’s recognizing the truth: that I’m lucky. I’m in a tizzy in my relatively safe perch, still with a job, knowing I have some savings to help if that changes. I have a different job to do in light of that: look for ways to be a helper. Meet loss with kindness.
I think it’s also remembering pleasure. Not denying desire. Last Sunday, I did a mammoth, 4-hour cooking session. I rubbed avocado oil, salt, and pepper under the skin of this beautiful, enormous chicken from a local butcher. Like, this chicken had hips. I filled its body cavity with lemon and rosemary. I cut open a red pepper only to discover a rotten mess — the cutting board ran red with it. I roasted cabbage until it was tender and browned and like tissue paper. I blasted a playlist so loud I hoped the neighbors would check in: I belted “Somewhere Out There” and “Dusty Trails” with a full, aching heart. I hope all of that went into my food. I hope to feed myself with it.
Because that’s another vow: to stay wild. Whitman knew the power and draw of this: “I too am not a bit tamed.” As I sung and danced, I laughed out loud. I wept. I made not a small spectacle of myself, and it was the closest to full-on joy that I’ve been in a while. Oh, there’s plenty here to dig into, some of it brutal. But it’s all alive. There is fire there, a fire that can sustain us.
Today, I sat down to write this. Another kind of vow: to honor what’s inside. To follow intuition. To try, as much as possible, to sit with the fear and work through it. To chew and digest, if only because it makes me more able to be here for others, too. I’m going to try. To stay home and find my work there.
I hope to keep finding ways to feed myself and my friends. To connect and go toward as much as I can. There’s more to come. I’m afraid of what it will bring. And I want to be part of the light. All of us, glowing from within.
