a meditation on memory what if the soul is just a memory, the body a vehicle that carries that memory forward? my breath - a remembering of when this air was made with our future inception in mind of when the trees dreamt of our clumsy smallness and hoped our hearts would be Big Enough. this grief - this icepick in my temple - the aching behind my eyes - a remembering of all the lives that mine has never touched yet were just as full, if not more so, as my own. lives that were loving and worthy of persisting. lives that have now been returned to the pool of knowings our bodies sip from. this movement - a remembering of my once water soon to be again, water pushing and pulling us through. at the base of a furled oak i ask, please, tell me a story. what do you remember of us, please? for i am only now but you speak in the language of eternity
I’ve been visiting myself through my old Substack posts. Procrastinating writing, procrastinating becoming anything more. Revisiting an old friend for the reminder that things change but not all that much.
I wonder if she can feel me looming; all toothy smile and chest cracked open, love pooling in the divet above my lip.
It is such a special thing to witness yourself in this way. To see the seeds and know how they bloomed.
I am a proud big sister. I am in awe and a bit envious of her wisdom. Her commitment and discipline to doing this thing.
Between then and now I’ve read little in volume but enough to have changed my mind ten times over. I’ve listened to and shared endless hours of stories, cried in front of at least 5 paintings, cried in at least 5 work meetings.
I shrunk 3/8ths of an inch. I befriended the two-year-old that lives next door; watching him learn how to string words together and form thoughts mostly about blueberries and other pleasantries.
Months and months ago, maybe even a year at this point, I asked some friends to consider a reality where the only memories you had at the end of your life were the ones made into music or poetry. A reality where you could only recall that which you could sing or recite.
Many were content knowing that whichever memories naturally arose as songs would be the ones they were left with in the end. They said that there is potency and preciousness in what remains without force.
They’re right.
I’d still make a song of my whole life. I would never stop singing.
I want everything alive with me, through me, at all times.
I want to collect rings around my body for each year I am alive — growing thicker and taller and wiser with the steadiness to show for it.
I want others to walk into my caverns in awe of how something can stand for so long after all the fire it’s beared; picturing all of the lives it has watched be born and die and repeat again. I want them to feel these lives with unfathomable clarity. To walk away knowing something they can’t quite explain.
(I sat with my first Sequoias this weekend. Can you tell? Have you been? There is nothing we could ever hope to know that they do not. That is clear. Go to them.)
So I’ll continue preparing this gift — this transcription of memory or whatever it is that I do here — for my 70-year-old self so she can laugh heartily on her porch somewhere sunny and green and in proximity to a flowing spring.
If you notice me back here more often, know that I’m trying my best to take every part of me with me. As far as she’ll go.
to remember is to keep alive. to be alive is to change. to archive is to collect the changes for future meaning-making.
I would like a big giant heap of stuff to sort through later.
I’ll start here.