When I soft-launched this newsletter three months ago, I had no idea that I was standing on the cusp of a season of calamities. Big and small. Personal and institutional. Health-related and otherwise. First a trip to the emergency room with a broken wrist (kid). Then a cancer diagnosis and a double mastectomy (mom). A mysterious mobility-impairing auto-immune flare-up (me). The heart-wrenching final chapter of a community that’s been at the center of my creative, educational, social and family life for a decade (lots of folks). And a slew of other crises that would’ve easily brought me to my knees if I hadn’t already been there. It’s basically been one emergency after another for three months straight.
This is not a plea for sympathy or a cry for help, although I don’t know who needs to hear this OH WAIT ME OVER AND OVER LITERALLY FOREVER, but it turns out that asking for support and leaning on your friends doesn’t make you whiny or weak, it makes you real, and your friends can handle your realness. But more on that later. For now, fair warning: the start of this story is rough.
The phone call that announced the first crash in the pile-up–the kid with the broken wrist–came while I was nestled under my laptop drafting an essay about the tension between two opposing states of lived experience: the addictive tug of reactivity to constant surface-level distractions that Clarissa Pinkola Estés (who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves) calls “the clattering world” and the gentle beckoning of deep creative solace that poet Mary Oliver refers to as “the summoning world.”
A few weeks earlier I’d teased these ideas apart in a conversation hosted by my dear friend Mwenya for a series of public dialogues called Unrehearsed Futures, but I hadn’t gotten the ideas down on paper yet. So there I was, wrapped in a blanket, finally unhooked from the clatter for a bit (two kids watching a movie in the other room and the third at a sleepover) furiously typing away about how hard it is to constantly toggle between these two states—a navigational feat especially fraught for artists, and even more so for artists who are also parents or caregivers—in a capitalistic system that teaches us to treat every little crackle of static in the clattering world as if it were a matter of life or death. The throb of adrenaline as we crack open our inboxes. The constant ping of notifications demanding ever wider swaths of our fraying focus. The bizarrely escalating methods for measuring our productivity and weighing our worth. Meanwhile, our subterranean musings? The wild and potentially generative ideas in our peripheral vision? The prismatic flares of our subconscious minds? Languishing in a sludgy layer near the bottom of our to-do lists. Creative longings we’ll finally let ourselves turn towards only after everything else gets handled.
The writing was kind of a grind–I hadn’t yet slipped into the mesmerism of flow-state and was still lumbering through the awkward phase—when the phone rang. Not a text message, mind you, an actual PHONE! CALL! with sleepover-kid’s best friend’s dad’s name flashing on the lock screen. Fifteen minutes later I was racing into the Cobble Hill emergency room, soaking wet from the rain and still absurdly wearing my slippers, for the first stage of a 24-hour odyssey that would involve an ambulance ride, a second emergency room in Manhattan, a ketamine sedation for a complicated bone reset procedure during which my kid, when asked what music he’d like to go under to, cracked up the whole orthopedic team and gave me a tiny chest-swell of parental pride by selecting “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode. I briefly considered asking if there was enough ketamine to go around.
Throughout the night and into the morning the emergency room buzzed and beeped and flooded with catastrophes, all of us separated by the flimsiest of curtains, everyone’s trauma vividly audible and at least partially visible to everyone else. A young man came in on the verge of bleeding out from a knife wound that he’d tried to stanch by packing it with coffee grounds, afraid that if he came to the hospital he’d get turned over to immigration. A teenage girl held compresses to her face and sobbed, terrified that the boyfriend she’d fled from would track her down. A man my age burst breathlessly through the doors, rain-drenched and barefoot, with a soaking wet, unresponsive toddler hanging slack-limbed in his arms. Later that night, a kind nurse who’d caught my eye when the dad and kid first arrived circled back to me and said, “we honor patient confidentiality here, but mother-to-mother, I just want to let you know: that kiddo’s stabilized now and he’s gonna pull through.” For the first time all night, my eyes welled with tears.
Here’s why I’m telling you all of this.
That whole 24 hours, as agonizing as it was to witness the pain of my own kid and the desperation of the people around me, underneath the awfulness of it all, there was also a bewildering, anesthetic hum of relief. Relief that this emergency room was currently eclipsing everything else. Relief that for this stretch of hours, my sprawling and unwieldy world–the opposing but equally draining daily efforts of keeping the clattering world at bay while doggedly following the glittering but often slippery threads of the summoning world–had collapsed into a single loud, fluorescent-lit room. Relief that I knew precisely what my role was here, and precisely how to do it. Relief that inside this brutal slog of hours within the six-square-foot confines of our curtains, I did not have to respond creatively to anything or facilitate anything or coax any abstract ideas into coherence. Relief that my presence alone was enough. Relief that I was enough.
I didn’t tell anyone about that feeling of relief for a long while afterwards. I have a tendency to keep quiet about what’s bothering me in general, and in this case the shame of that relief in the context of other people’s suffering was too much to fully admit to myself, let alone to anyone else. But then one evening I found myself deep in conversation with my friend Neha, whose now-thriving young daughter was born six weeks premature and spent the first month and a half of her life in the NICU at New York Presbyterian. Neha told me that she’d recently been running errands, happened to walk by that same hospital and was stopped in her tracks–not so much by the terrifying memory of how she and her partner had kept vigil over their daughter’s tiny fragile body and all the trauma they’d endured during those heart-wrenching weeks–but by a mystifying pang of nostalgia. Telling me the story, Neha threw up her hands. “I mean, WHAT?! That place was an absolute living hell for us. How could I possibly feel nostalgic for it?”
Neither of us could quite put our fingers on it, but I’d experienced that same bewildering, quasi-longing when remembering past trauma, too. I told Neha that last summer to celebrate our 21st anniversary, Erik and I had made top ten lists of our most cherished, meaningful moments of being married to each other, and when we compared them over dinner that night, we discovered that weirdly enough, a LOT of the memories on our lists were either really scary or really sad. One of my top ten us-moments was helping Erik write his eulogy for his mom at our neighborhood coffee shop a week before our daughter was born. One of Erik’s was practicing his eulogy for his dad in front of me and the kids on the morning of the service, the same way his dad had practiced his eulogy in front of Erik and his siblings the morning of their grandfather’s funeral. We both listed the day we had to put our beloved dog Leon to sleep, remembering the way we sat together and held his limp, furry body in our arms and cried with the sunlight streaming in on us through the windows of our tiny East Village apartment.
Erik and I thought it was odd and kind of macabre that we’d both chosen so many painful memories. But talking to Neha about it that night, I started to realize that the unexpected (though admittedly fucked-up) gift of emergencies is that they blot out everything but the unfiltered tenderness of the current moment. I mean, obviously, emergencies are bad. The escalation of the clattering world to a point of breakdown is bad. Fracture. Organ failure. Systems failure. Death. No one wishes an emergency on themselves or on anyone else—it would be obscene. But for these time-out-of-time expanses in our lives, even though we're suffering, there's a unity of awareness that directly soothes our longing for our own raw presence—and, if we’re lucky, the presence of the loved ones there with us. So maybe what we’re longing for isn’t the bad thing after all, but the way it presses us directly to the flushed skin of the world. The way it holds us there, wordless and still.
As I walked home from that conversation with Neha, I wondered: What would it look like to consciously summon that same singularity of presence in the form of a not-bad emergency? To coax myself into a state of holographic and hyper-dialed-in awareness by escalating love or desire or spiritual communion or creative longing to the point of systems-overwhelm? What if I let that premise be the anchor for my artistic practice: a regular commitment to intentionally escalate the summoning world to a state of emergency?
I didn’t know it at that moment, but I was about to get an opportunity to play out this thought experiment in vivid detail. Here’s the last part of the story.
A couple of weeks after the broken wrist, I decided to host a casual get-together at the studio. Just a few artist friends sharing some conversation and work in progress. But plans spiraled–in a good way. First, a group of us decided the gathering would be a perfect excuse to debut a dance/ poetry/ vocal/ electronic music piece we’d been collaborating on. Then a friend who manages a trio of Chilean singer-songwriters called JuanaRosa arranged for them to grace us with a mini private concert that night as a final unofficial stop on their North American tour. A beloved friend and collaborator agreed to open the night with an improvisational vocal meditation. Former students signed on to help set up and support. Before we knew it more than fifty people had RSVP’ed.
And then in the days right before the event, the remaining crashes of calamity season came screeching into the pile-up. My auto-immune issues kicked into high-gear and made it hard for me to walk. My mom called with the news of her cancer diagnosis. The board vote to determine the fate of the beloved institution was announced for the very next morning after the gathering. A bunch of other shit went down that I won’t get into. Point is: if anyone ever had an excuse to cancel an event, it was me.
But something in me resisted. Bad emergencies are never, ever convenient. Could I say yes to a good emergency even at the least convenient moment? The answer felt clear. Life is a fucking catastrophe. Summon the joy anyway.
So we did.
I barely remember the details of the night. I gave myself the gift of a rare double dose of meds and let my body feel buoyant and dislocatingly pain-free–a warm, luminous blur. The studio itself was the belle of the ball, transformed by many loving hands from a functional workspace into a vibey dreamscape of candles, flowers, music, food and art. I watched as people from different parts of my life introduced themselves to each other, chatted, wandered through the space to look at the work on the walls and tables, laughed and hugged.
At a certain point, the room got quiet, I stood up to welcome everyone, and realized in real-time that I’d forgotten to prepare remarks. The heightened swell of the moment erratically delivered my brain to the very first word in the poem we’d just performed, which happened to be the word “bearer.” In the poem I’d used the word to mean someone who bears a child. That seemed like a joyful enough note to start on.
But when I stood there, looking around the room at my community, an entirely different meaning hit me. I realized, as I made eye contact with each person, just how many of them had chosen to show up that night despite the incredible weight they were bearing. A friend whose family was grappling with the reality that his sister might soon need to enter hospice. Another friend who was fighting lung cancer. A number of folks who had recently lost parents and family members. And I thought about how much I’d been bearing, too, and how up to that point I hadn’t told anyone about most of it because I was scared I’d be seen as complaining or self-centered. Or that I’d be received as a burden or a downer. That I’d be too much for anyone to know what to do with.
And so I opened my mouth and listened half-baffled as the voice pouring out of me started intricately unpacking the word “bearer”–not leading with the most joyful meanings, but with the most devastating. I heard myself talk about how being a bearer can mean being someone who bears terrible burdens or comes bearing bad news. Someone who bears suffering, alone and in silence. Or even someone who, with their fellow pallbearers at a funeral, bears the literal weight of death. And I acknowledged how so many of us in the room at that moment were bearing up under unthinkable weight and pain and trauma, and had chosen to be there anyway.
Then I pivoted back to the other end of the spectrum, the generative meanings I’d originally thought of. A bearer as someone who creates life. Someone who bears a child, or comes bearing gifts. Someone whose creative work bears fruit, or whose leadership bears light to illuminate the path. And how many of us in the room were also embodying these meanings at the same time as we carried our grief.
And then: a new idea flashed in my brain. This was the gift of the escalation of the summoning world to a state of a full-blown emergency in that moment, standing there in front of my beloveds with no notes and my conscious mind obliterated by sleeplessness and meds and the anxiety of the days before, trusting that whatever needed to come though would come. And come it did: the idea that being a bearer also means being someone who bears witness. Bearers as people who deeply see the suffering and joy of those around them, and their own, and who listen to stories of pain and delight–including the complicated, messy, unresolved ones–and hold them with reverence and care.
That was the point of the night, I realized. For us to be bearers, in all forms of the word. The art and the music and the food were great, but all of that was just the container. Inside was a chance for us to bear our ache, our light and our witness for and with one another, and to allow ourselves, for a little while, to be collectively held aloft.
* * *
I’m grateful to say that I think I’ve come–and I’m pausing dramatically to knock wood as I type this because my superstitious Irish grandmother raised no fools–through this season of calamities and out the other side. The kid’s wrist has healed. My mom’s surgery was successful. I’m on new meds that seem to be working. Knock, knock, knock.
There’s still a lot of heartbreak swirling around me these days. But I’ve started talking to friends a lot more openly lately about what feels tender. Turns out that bearing witness is the alpha and the omega of what we can give each other. It’s the alchemy that melds the clattering world and the summoning world into a unity of presence, whether those states get escalated to an emergency or stay simmering at a low boil. It brings us into communion with each other in our joy and our grief, and everywhere in between.
Here’s to a new season with room for all of it, and all of us.
* * *
Currently listening to…
Joga by Bjork, which I’ve basically had stuck in my head every day for the last twenty five years, especially the part that goes:
and you push me up to a
state of emergency
how beautiful to be
state of emergency
is where I want to be
It’s taken me since 1997, but I think I finally get what she’s talking about.
Speaking of Bjork talking about things, I’ve been devouring her podcast, Sonic Symbolism, where she breaks down each of her ten studio albums, one per episode. Also loved her conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib on his always mind-expanding podcast Object of Sound.
Currently reading/ re-reading things about emergencies and emergence including…
Storytelling is an Emergency from the voluminous mind of Sophie Strand, who just published a new book, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. I can’t wait to sink into it. I was so happy to finally meet Sophie in person at her recent reading at The Alchemist Kitchen after having the chance to host her in conversation a while back for Seed + Spark’s Spark Series.
Emergent Strategy, by adrienne maree brown. Never not in the re-reading rotation.
Meditations in an Emergency, a slim volume of poems by Frank O’Hara, which, after appearing in Mad Men Season 2 back in 2008, got a low-grade version of the spike in public awareness that Running Up That Hill got from Stranger Things Vol 4. Revisiting the poems recently brought me some solace during my stretch of calamities, but I honestly think the most magnetic part of the book is its four-word title. That paradoxical push-pull of reflective stillness in the thick of devastating chaos gets me (no surprise) right where I live.
Emergence Magazine. I mentioned this publication in an earlier newsletter, and I’m still smitten. Slowly working through their first three issues and lush online offerings. So good.
Currently sorting through…
Beautiful photos and footage from the studio gathering I wrote about above, which I’ll share soon.
Currently planning…
Another studio gathering–which you’re invited to!--this time in the form of a pop-up with some of my musical mates, who also happen to be badass artists, jewelers and makers. Join us Monday eve, December 19th 6-9 pm for art, adornments, drinks, snacks and live music. A portion of proceeds from the evening will go to charity. More details to come, but reply to this email if you’re interested and I’ll keep you in the loop. (And I promise I won’t talk about emergencies at all.)
Thanks for reading. This whole writing-down-words-about-feelings-and-sharing-them-with-other-humans thing is still really new and tender, and I welcome your thoughts and feedback. Drop me a line.
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