Ten Years
“Just beyond my sight,
Something that I cannot see,
I’ve been circling around a thought,
That’s been circling ‘round me.
Like the vapor of a song,
That is just out of earshot,
And I thought I knew the question,
But I guess not. ”
I’ve been listening to this song, Every Little Bit of It, by Carrie Newcomer on repeat this month during my many car trips back and forth between Tacoma and Portland. Moving a household carload by carload slows the process down a lot…a mixed blessing. The minutiae can be excruciating–I’ve been forced to touch every object, every box that I load into my Honda, asking myself that now infamous, maybe wee bit precious question, does this spark joy? When you’re moving three people from a 1400 sq ft to 750 sq ft apartment, though, it becomes necessary to consider.
Moving this way, rather than in one frantic, ridiculously overpriced week of movers and never-on-time truck means I do have time and space–to drive, to ponder, to listen, to cry (so many tears between Kalama and Castle Rock, for some strange reason) to be silent. Newcomer’s voice is pure magic–deep and resonant, perfectly matching my own singing range, which makes singing along a particular joy. I can feel the resonance deep in my blessedly unscarred lungs, the unruly expanding softness of my belly, the marrow of my bones. Then there are the lyrics, so perfectly aligned with this season of my life. I, too, find myself circling, in the same way that Rilke writes in his well-known poem Widening Circles.
These days I wonder if the questions I’ve been chasing my whole life are even relevant anymore. The whole world is a fucking dumpster fire. Does it matter if I’m a falcon, a storm, or the song? Who cares? Should I care? Maybe I’m all of them. Maybe none of them. What happens if I stop asking questions? Stop expecting answers? What emerges then? Am I brave enough to pause that long and find out?
The things I find myself called to in this season of my life reside in an alternate universe than the one I’ve inhabited these past ten years. The questions are unsettlingly familiar in that primal way we recognize at a certain age. Oh, you. Yes. You’ve been asking for an audience for years and I keep telling my frontal cortex secretary to tell you not this week, maybe next week. Maybe next year. Nevertheless, they persisted. Oh, how they persisted.
And now, the questions all come rumbling in, fresh from someone else’s party, laughing and joking and not bothering to ring the doorbell or knock at all. They just all pile into my weary heart, dragging their drunk friend and the drunk friend’s ex with them. It’s a bouncy house full of rowdy, belligerent questions demanding that I sit the fuck down and listen.
I thought I knew the question,
But I guess not.
“There it is just below the surface of things,
In a flash of blue, and the turning of wings.
Drain the glass, drink it down, every moment of this,
Every little bit of it, every little bit. ”
I’ve been drowning these past two years—drinking and drowning in isolation, loneliness, and a collective despair/rage/grief that was too large to name or tame. My son, my sparkly, magical unicorn of a child that somehow emerged from my body with a radiance that I can’t claim, is one of the few things that kept me alive these past few years. Meeting his needs and helping him tend to his own grief after an abrupt move and separation from the only home he knew forced me to wake up each morning, and each moment, to hold him and his grief with tenderness. It reminded me that I needed to play, to move, to look beyond my own weary world view.
I stumbled. A lot. Every day, it was deep, treacherous mud. There are bruises upon bruises in this heart of mine. Some days it felt easier–the only reasonable option, really–just to collapse down in it and close my eyes, hoping desperately that someday it wouldn’t be quite so sticky, so dark, so cold, so relentless.
But then, he’d offer me a flash of blue, a turning of wings, and I’d rouse.
“I swam against the tide,
I tripped on my own pride,
So I’ll try again today,
To get out of my own way.
The face was always in the stone,
Said Michelangelo,
We just have to chip and clear,
To see what is already there.”
Ten years ago, I was preparing for my first trip to Korea with Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link, with their First Trip Home project (no longer in operation, but they offer something similar called Sotdae). In September 2012, my husband and I spent three weeks in Korea, based in Seoul, but also spent time in Daegu (my birth city), Busan, and Jeju Island. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by people (25 million of them!!) who looked like me. It was a profound, heart/mind/body opening experience.
At the end of those three weeks, I desperately wanted to stay, apply for an F-4 visa, and for a GOA’L scholarship to study Korean. The only thing that brought me back to Portland was the fact that I was already registered for my final quarter of nursing school prerequisites: I just had one last class to go, microbiology. I had planned to apply to midwifery school at OHSU that fall after having spent the previous two years researching all the pathways to midwifery, working as a doula, and taking all the nursing school prereqs. It was a grueling process and I just couldn’t allow myself the uncertainty to walk away from it. I wasn’t that brave yet. So, I left a piece of my heart in Korea, promising I’d return soon.
Ten years later.
I’m a certified nurse-midwife and Mama to that completely unexpected, unplanned, magical, sparkling six year-old unicorn of joy. My marriage of 12 years has nearly collapsed, at least twice. I’ve quit more than one clinical job, completely disheartened by the emotional toll of working within the medical industrial complex.
My family and I moved to a new state for a new job in August 2020, right before Oregon burst into climate change-mediated wildfires following a summer of nightly protests after the murder of George Floyd. Less than four months after we moved and sold our house, I quit that “dream” job when I realized I couldn’t reconcile my personal and professional moral and ethical obligations with the culture of the corporation I worked for.
I then did the thing I swore I would never do: I started my own private practice. Ha! That one simple sentence looks so neat and tidy on paper. If only. Even now, I get tired just thinking about it.
Just when it seemed that maybe the dust was settling, my husband’s business partner and best friend of more than twenty years died suddenly in November 2021, sending my husband into a spiral of grief and deep depression that had been building up the entire pandemic. I had already been deep in my own depression that descends seasonally, leading me to transfer all my birth clients to other midwives and downsize my practice to make life more manageable. After identifying that we were in a mental health crisis as a family in February, we are now in the process of moving back to Portland to be closer to our friends and family.
After ten years of building, building, building, I’m now chipping and clearing, sometimes just plain sledgehammering–so much built up residue, very little of it essential, a lot of it distracting and unnecessary. I vacillate between gratitude for finally being able to let that shit go, and grief that I let it take up so much space for so long in the first place.
The face was always in the stone. Sometimes that’s a painful and expensive lesson to learn. My arms are getting some good exercise these days as I haul chip away more pieces.
“There it is in the apple of every new notion,
There it is in the scar healed over what was broken,
In the branches, in the whispering, in the silence and the sighs,
And the curious promise of limited time. ”
Ah, the curious promise of limited time. This phrase has echoed all month. The way Newcomer sings it, a rich, cello-like stroke, with an unexpected pause for breath between the words curious promise of and limited time. It catches in my throat and out of nowhere, a tear falls each time.
This limited time, this one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver names it…these branches, that whispering, this silence. Now that I’m emerging from the mud pit of depression, I feel a bit greedy, eager to feel it all, even the scars. After not feeling for so many months, the ability to feel, to truly notice, makes me almost giddy. Then I turn my head back toward the raucous party of questions still dancing in my heart at 4am and I get a little tired. I need a little more quiet. Maybe that’s enough chipping and clearing away for today. If the face has been in the stone all this time, it can probably wait another day.
“It’s true although it’s hard,
A shadow glides over the ridge.
And one fast beating heart,
Tries with its might to live.
We sense but can’t describe,
From the corner of our eye
Something nameless and abiding,
And so we keep transcribing. ”
Something nameless and abiding.
That’s what I’m pulled towards these days. Somewhere amidst that nameless abiding, a question–or maybe two if I’m lucky–will emerge. With a clarity I haven’t experienced in years, they will slam their glass down on the table, look me straight in the eye, and wordlessly, I will know. I will know, and I will drink it down.
Every little bit of it.
