The People, The People, The People
The day of the party I sat cross legged in my shower, the hot water pouring over my shoulders. I wondered at my hesitance to throw the handle to the right, to the cold. Always that fuzzy curtain of resistance, like the veil in the temple, thick and stifling. But much stronger than usual this time. The warmth wrapped itself around me as if to never let go.
I didn’t want it to.
As somebody who spends most of his life squirreled away; squirreling away on his keyboard below the painting of the monk holding a torch at the darkness, I was afraid. Afraid of the cold water from the shower and the much colder water of my partner’s 40th birthday party, starting promptly at 6:30pm Mountain Standard Time.
My partner deserved a Gathering. She is a Gathering. The word extraverted comes to mind, but that would be a reduction, or some deconstructed ingredient of the whole. Perhaps the carrot to the carrot soup. She’s a people-powered sun-kissed desert dweller with more capacity for other humans than any human I know. I frequently ask her if she’s collected anybody new recently. She delights in people, and people delight in her, which is why she delights in people. And so on.
On the other hand, I’m a silence-powered rain-drenched Northwesterner with a Nordic interior landscape and a left eye that twitches when I’m stressed. It was twitching like a hummingbird when I slammed the shower to cold. Introverted comes to mind, but I’m afraid that too is a reduction. The Enneagram four in me agrees.
Hello old friend — this is what I call the cold water, old friend. I could stay here forever, I remember thinking. I could sit in this cold shower and I wouldn’t have to go. One of the voices at “my table” likes to suggest that I just stay. It doesn’t matter where. Stay in bed. Stay in the shower. Stay on this road. What would happen, it asks, if you just never moved again? Would that be so bad?
To be clear, I wasn’t afraid of the party proper, even though the guest list clocked in around 55. I knew I would feel like a foosball with six toddlers on the sticks. I was ok with that. It was the following day I feared, the vulnerability crash I knew was coming, the kind that only words can wash out of me. So here I am.
Back in the shower, it’s 5:00pm. My elbows are bent at ninety degrees like I’m holding a pile of firewood. My strength is my body. I repeat the mantra. Breath in. Feel your heart pump, feel its strength. Flex. I draw strength from my physical body.
Now arms up in a cross like Wonder Woman blocking a bullet. My protection is my family. My community. My children. The one’s who protect me from the demons within. Breathe in and out.
Now eyes open and arms stretched toward the sunlight spilling through the window. My life is light. This last position always the most difficult for me. A twinge of embarrassment as I let go and stretch my palms upward to the light. Nobody is watching, but the cringe lingers. Perhaps a moldy leftover from a prior life when a cosmic eye was always watching; weighing and measuring, sifting chaff from grain, every decision, every thought and action going into the calculus of my eternal fate. Difficult to shake that.
6:30pm arrives and The Gathering is a blur. Faces appear in front of me, comfortable old ones, sparkly new ones. I see two old ones wander to the street for a smoke, I want to join them, but I need to smile for a picture. A new face tips something pink and bubbly and delicious into my plastic cocktail cup. A childhood face leans in wrapping an arm around me, a miniature hand is attached to her finger. I laugh.
My partner, she’s dancin’, she’s prancin’, she da da da da dancin’. The energy is good. Her sister is letting go on the mic, singing away the stress. Her partner on lead is wholly lost in the place only live music can take you, a place he needs to be right now it seems.
And then I see it. We miss each other. Other humans that is.
This celebration feels like a “fuck you” to a system that eats us and chews us and swallows us then shits us out. We’re all so tired. We are hiding under our desks in a prolonged school shooting, one that hasn’t stopped for three years. Our adrenals are splattered over the classroom walls, burning up in a rapidly warming sun, hiding in the closet from Russian war criminals, or artificial intelligence. An election year around the corner! Apocalypse bingo! We’re so tired of not trusting each other, of bickering, and wondering, and gossiping, and worrying.
As I write this, I don’t feel much hope for the future. At least not in the way our parents did. Our systems are failing us. Anybody with two eyes can see this.
But the people we love — old and new — they aren’t failing us. I have to believe in the goodness of humans. I have to. There’s no other way to cope today. And for six hours on Saturday night I saw it. When celebration feels like a middle finger, you know something has shifted around you.
He tangata
He tangata
He tangata
These are the last words of an ancient Maori prayer. They simply mean…
It’s the people
It’s the people
It’s the people
Our ancestors held the truth of it. It’s the people. I hope this brings you some comfort. It does for me. At least for today.
