Unbuilding a Life

Reflections, Poem, Prompt

I spent the last three days in the Red River Gorge—rock climbing, hiking, stargazing, plunging my feet into icy creeks, and plunging my heart into endless green, with its first tiny ripples of yellow and red. I feel both like I’ve been emptied—the rushing river of my thoughts has slowed to a quiet trickle—and like I’m overflowing. How absurdly lucky I am to get to spend whole days in the woods! How absurdly lucky I am that my body has regained so much strength and health. How absurdly lucky, how absurdly lucky.

As I drove out of the woods and back into the built world, back into my built life with its built ways of thinking, I found myself wondering how to bring wilderness, more of my own creaturely nature, more of my innate connection to forests and creeks and craggy cliffs into my daily life. Can I learn to think and feel and be in a Kroger parking lot the way I am in a pine grove or seated in a sandstone arch? And if not, how might I unbuild my life? How might I show up and do my part in this human world while at the same time living within the deeper, slower current of the realer world that saturates and surrounds us?

I have no answers—not yet—but I have so many questions. For me, that’s one of the gifts of time spent in nature, especially solitary time—my need-to-know-now-once-and-for-all mind quiets down, and my oooooh-I-wonder mind perks up. I stop working—stop trying to fix things into place within some tidy mental universe. I let myself be worked on. The wind sweeps through me and the chirping of crickets becomes the sound of my own cells, shuffling, reassembling, starting . . . what? I don’t know, but a stretch of time in the woods always feels to me like a new beginning.

And yet, a voice rattles in my head, telling me not to trust this. (Of course it does.) It offers up a list of the things I could and should have gotten done this weekend. It tells me I ought to be working harder. I hear these words, but for the most part, I don’t feel them. I don’t believe them.

I would rather accomplish one thing with a spirit of presence, playfulness, openness, and generosity than accomplish ten things with a spirit of anxious urgency. What gets called productivity is all too often destructivity—destruction of ecosystems, destruction of others, destruction of ourselves. I am slowly learning how not to destroy myself. I am unlearning the beliefs and patterns that had me laying my well-being on the altars of patriarchy and capitalism, watching politely as their high priests struck match after match, then wondering why I felt so used up, so burnt out, so resentful.

Darlings, I have no new poems to show for all my wandering in the woods—no proofs of productivity. All I have are random lines and images floating around inside me. Things like,

a canopy of kinglets, fluttering in the breeze

and

lichen fractals white,
snowflakes that refused to melt,
just slurped the rain
and grew

I have plenty of new lines and images, but no intact poem, and I haven’t made an earnest effort to wrestle one into existence. My body is back in the built world, but my soul is still basking in the quiet of the woods. I’m still in that space of being worked on—by the natural world with all its beauty and decay, by the reality that I am that world, am beauty and decay. I’m not ready to break that spell. And anyway, I trust its magic—trust it to direct and amplify whatever work I do next.

Suddenly, it occurs to me that I do have a poem to share with you—one that feels relevant to everything I’m trying to say. It’s just an itty bitty first draft of a poem that I wrote back in April and never returned to. I haven’t given any thought to a title. If you have a suggestion, feel free to lay it on me! Here you go:

The Poem

I am working.
I am working very hard
at work that few
seem eager to do.

I am belly up
and suspended in air,
swaying on a swing, legs stretched,
toes spreading like Maple’s canopy.

I am working
on letting the world
gust through me. 

The Prompt

If you’re craving a prompt for reflection or journaling or a poem of your own, then here are a few questions that I’m sitting with at the moment, and I invite you to sit with them, too. This isn’t the stuff of a traditional poetry prompt, but I think the best poems arrive when we’re living deeply into our lives, and these questions are very much about that. I’d love to hear your answers, reflections, or adjacent poems in the comments thread!

1. What do you want to be working on?

2. What are you working on?

3. If there is a discrepancy between your answers to 1 and 2, why is that? (For the truly inquisitive, take your answer to this question, and follow up on it with another round of why is that. Repeat this process as many times as you’d like.)

4. What is working on you?

5. How can you tell? What impact are those forces having?

6. How might you work on the things that are working on you—opening yourself to more of the good stuff and giving less space and power to the forces that feel detrimental?

As I sit with these questions, I’m struck by the reality that every one of us is being worked on all the time—by the air we breathe, the water we drink, the people we interact with, the books we read, the quiet moments we do or do not settle into, the advertisements we view, the chiming of our phones, the static of our fears, the nature of our relationships, our relationship to our own nature, the systems that structure society, the beliefs that undergird our systems, the aging of our bodies, our attention to our bodies, the physical spaces we inhabit . . . this list could go on and on and on. I’m struck, too, by the fact that some of these forces are working on us for our good—and others to our detriment. Some of these forces support us in the work we feel called to do—and others overwhelm us with doubt or delay or distraction. It occurs to me that this is work worth doing: taking an inventory of the forces working on me, noticing which ones I have the power to dial up or down, relaxing into my own integrity, and then tweaking the dials accordingly.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. And I’m so grateful to you for holding space for my musings and wanderings! If you enjoy reading this Substack, then here’s something else I think you might enjoy—my debut novel. It’s not the best thing ever written, but I think it’s the best thing I have ever written.

Ordering from IngramSpark sends more of the profits to me, but bookshop.org is another great choice, since you can designate an independent bookstore to receive a share of the profits. And of course, if you prefer e-books, you can find it on Amazon, as well. If you read ALL IS WELL, please reach out and tell me about your experience! Writing a book is a long, solitary endeavor, and I’m so excited about this part—where I get to have actual conversations with actual people about the characters who live in my head.