A common myth about writing: It’s a solitary art. But I’ve never been very good at writing alone and while the image of the lone writer in a secluded cabin might be romantic, it’s appeal starts and stops in my imagination. Functionally, writing is always an act of reaching outward: to the anticipated reader, a future self, a time unknown. I write because I’m trying to understand the world, what I owe it, and how to love it.
A few months ago, I told my friend Vahni that I think of writing as a practice of noticing. Vahni is one of my closest friends and I’m grateful that she remembered, because I had forgotten. In this way, we write together, we conspire in our observation of the world. It seems important to start here, with reaching outward, with friendship, because a resistance to acting alone is tantamount to my efforts to both behold the world as it is and fight for its future.
More than a year ago, in a writing workshop surrounded by friends and classmates, I observed at the end of a praise-only workshop that all of my work comes to the same conclusion: The self is an illusion. I was almost joking. Except that much of my work is concerned with the porosity of memory, personality, and experience. And I’m particularly invested in the idea of shared experiences: Those that we share with other human animals, yes, but also those that supposedly occur alone.
I’ve been preoccupied for years now with rivers and waterways, the obvious way that the current flows, constituted not simply of water but of stones rolling on the bottom, fishes swimming, microorganisms clinging to leaf matter as it floats downstream, even me, when I venture out from the bank to swim. Aren’t we all this way: Made up every person, human, non-human, animate, and inanimate with whom we’ve ever crossed paths? And isn’t that a way to reimagine the world and our place in it? Suddenly we become endlessly vast and timeless.
A nonfiction writer must be concerned with memory: where they’ve come from and what they’re becoming. Recently, my mother recounted a story about me. More than twenty years ago, before my sister was born and when my brother and I were barely beyond toddlers, my family went sledding on the farmland property of my mother’s colleague. He volunteered to take me on a run down the hill in one of those rigid blue sleds with the pull string, which while ostensibly for steering, does nothing. Cruising down the snowy hill, our path was interrupted by a snow-covered bush. We thudded against it and I recall the shake of its low branches as they dumped snow on top of us. I can imagine the cold powder of snow sneaking down the back of my jacket and melting into the neck of my sweater. Only, I don’t know if the sled was blue and in my mind’s eye, the hill is the electrical right-of-way in my childhood neighborhood. I don’t know where the memory comes from, if I’ve just heard it's telling enough to believe. But I love that my mother remembers. And the feeling of snow down the back of a jacket never leaves you.
So writing becomes an art of cataloging the known and unknown, of crafting the possibility that exists between the two. We often speak of imagining the future as a means of remaking the world. And I believe in imagination as a powerful force for change. But the question becomes one of next steps: What are we to do after imagining? For myself, I work to cultivate a sense of possibility in which these ideas can take root and grow. Think of amending the soil at the start of a new gardening season: by providing the right conditions, we make a livable future all the more possible.
It is now early May, so I’m looking for new buds everywhere I go and tending diligently to the porch garden I’ve assembled. I wanted to write about gardening as an action I take in response to planetary conditions because it, like writing, is a deceptive task, something supposedly undertaken alone but which presupposes a future. Writing and gardening are both acts of possibility and dare to ask what if?
For me, writing occurs primarily in the mind. I write while on walks, while falling asleep, while washing the dishes. At any given moment, I am rephrasing a sentence, tweaking my words, attempting to enliven text with the textures of the world around me. In the past year, I’ve become interested in noticing practices as one means of rephrasing and recontextualizing the world. Last summer, I connected with the work of Pauline Oliveros, whose principles of deep listening allowed me to reach new sensory realms in my work. Just as listening intently reveals distinct presences and absences in everyday sounds, the haptic experience of gardening reminds me of material experience, gets me out of my head and into my body. Gardening is one answer to the space of possibility that opens in the very act of reaching out to touch.
Walking through my neighborhood a few days ago, I spotted a scarlet poppy, drooping with the weight of its beauty. I could scarcely resist holding its soft sheaf of petals between two fingers, their papery softness almost like filo dough and just as delicate. Again, grasping the translucent, ghostly leaf of a pepper, I understand that it’s sunscorched, moved outside too quickly. It will be okay. But first I have to hold it.
We’ve been practicing for this all our lives.
In 2019, while studying in Scotland, I read Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain for the first time. The book’s original manuscript was written during World War II and then left in a drawer for more than thirty years. I like that writing can be about more than a need for remembrance. It can be about locating oneself in the present and attesting to the simple fact of hereness.
Toward the end of the book, Shepherd reflects on our senses. She writes, “Touch is the most intimate sense of all. The whole sensitive skin is played upon, the whole body, braced, resistant, poised, relaxed, answers to the thrust of forces incomparably stronger than itself.” Shepherd routinely invokes our comparative smallness, the strange fact of being surrounded by so much non-being. I love that these ‘forces incomparably stronger’ are those that invite experiences otherwise unknown to the human body: the stream of wind that catches at your back on an open hill, the drop of water that falls from the canopy to land in your hair, the specific turgidity of a well-watered leaf.
Each new experience of touch adds to the catalog of known and unknown things, expanding our selves and deepening our presence in the world. So it’s with that old combination of curiosity and hope that I keep reaching out my hands.
An Offering:
Get Up Close
● Find a safe place to get as close to a textured surface as you can. Maybe you lay down in the grass or investigate the striated bark of a tree or find new cobwebs between the slats of a picnic table. Get closer than you usually would. Get even closer.
● Consider the contours of the world you’ve discovered. Note who you meet. Touch as gently as you can.
