Some days, I write the words that spill out of me or swirl around me. Or the words that dangle right in front of me, as clear and bright as raindrops, suspended from the bare branches of trees like tiny mirrors held up to all that naked beauty. Other days, my senses feel clouded, and my mind is a freight train, spewing exhaust and hauling nothing good but chugging at full speed all the same. On those days, I write the words that I need to hear. Today, I am writing the words that I need to hear.
It has always been the small things that save me. I walk along, tangled in my own fear, until I am stopped by a spider web, strung between summer’s dead weeds and shimmering in silver light. I stomp across the fields and into the woods, where oak leaves matte in a thick, wet carpet, and I feel like a thick, wet carpet, but then one leaf catches my eye, a curving bowl, still crisp, that holds yesterday’s rain and today’s morning light, and for a moment I can hold it all—yesterday, today, maybe even tomorrow.
Have you noticed that moss shines greener on the grayest days? Have you walked with such care that you can feel the roll of an acorn through your boots, can discern it from the twigs and buckeyes and rising and falling of ground? Have you felt the freight train in your mind go silent and still for one breath or maybe two because you had given your attention to something small, something simple, something quiet?
It was quiet in the woods this morning, apart from my chugging thoughts. The trees were nearly still, and their cast-off leaves were too wet to crackle beneath my feet. My boots squeaked, though, so I stopped walking and let the silence around me permeate my skin. Cardinals and white-throated sparrows chirped but did not sing. Each tiny vocalization, high and clear, quickly fell back into the silence from which it came. I could hear something in the distance, far beyond the stillness. A train, of all things. An actual one, not the one in my head. But it reminded me of the one in my head, which had—I realized—gone silent for just a breath. It had faded to a barely audible blur beyond the clear call of a bright red cardinal.
I have been saved over and over by tiny things. And still, there’s this impulse—when something in the world around me or something within the press of my own mind feels too heavy, too big, too much—to scan the horizon for something superlative. I imagine that only something enormous can shake me loose from my own gravity or lift me from circumstances not of my choosing. The truth is, almost every lifting in my life began with a grounding—with a pressing into what’s already present, the way a cardinal presses against its perch to leap into flight.
As I write this, I feel my body softening. My shoulders are sliding down away from my ears, and my toes are wiggling a greeting to the ground. My breath has dropped from high in my chest to deep in my belly. Writing is one of the small things that saves me over and over again. Reading is another one. Here is one of my favorite things that I’ve read in the past week, Jeannine Ouellette beautiful essay on writing, surviving, and “the saving grace of looking outward,” published in Jane Ratcliffe’s Substack, Beyond.
Since reading Jeannine’s essay, I’ve been thinking about the power of noticing. I’ve been wondering how it is that the tiniest thing can change your perspective on something big and heavy. I’ve been remembering a moment, which I wrote about here, when I was sick as hell and afraid of having to give up custody of my kids, and I went outside and lay in the grass, where I curled in a ball and shook with tears. When I’d cried myself dry, I blinked my eyes open. A rabbit sat looking at me. He twitched his nose, and that small motion was enough to twitch something back into place within my own soul, so that I could make it through another moment—through another day sharp with uncertainty.
That’s what sets the train whirring, I think: the uncertainty of everything. The unpredictable ups and downs of health and finances and single parenting and querying literary agents. The heartbreaking and beyond-my-control events that unfurl in the wider world. I’ve tried responding to this radical uncertainty in dozens of ways, and I haven’t found a better way than this: radical presence. For me, the answer to “what now?” is almost always “what’s here?” I’ve been saved by bunny noses, water droplets, and the tiny caps of acorns more times than I can count.
What saves you? What seemingly insignificant things ground you or lift you? Break you open or make you feel whole?
This is just (sniff) beautiful. Thank you for your generosity to put experience into words that paint vivid pictures, and then to share them with us. I am richer for the reading and inspired to notice further.
The words you needed to hear were a balm for this reader as well. The imagery of the oak leaf bowl and the noticing of small things that have a surprisingly deep and soulful impact reminded me of the Japanese concept of mono no aware. I love such things. Some of the little things that have saved me lately (some of which I've mentioned to you recently): the unexpectedly warm and gracious phlebotomist I was paired with at the lab; two squishy dollops of bright orange gel fungus nestled in equally bright green moss on yes, a gray day; and learning that oceans can be flatulent. So grateful when these glimmers make it through the internal fog.