Poems, Bricks, & Bunkers: we're all just animals at the end of the day
Four mini essays from the last full week in January
This poem which I can’t stop thinking about [Sunday, Jan 21]
I saw a quote recently that said something along the lines of, “Reading a poem in January is as lovely to go for a walk in June.” I can’t remember how I came across this poem, but if I had to guess, I’d say the culprit is probably my friend, Mary Shelley, who is always sharing some delightful Mary Oliver poem that fits the moment perfectly.1 There’s a lot I love about this poem— how I somehow feel like the grasshopper, the movement within this moment of stillness (which makes me consider different perspectives within the same moment— a kind of thought that takes me out of my own body for a second like a lucid dreaming while awake, though admittedly I’ve never had one of those asleep, so who knows), and the question at the end which stays with [me/you/us] the way peanut butter sticks to the roof of [my/your/our] mouth[s].
It’s not really the question part that gets me so much of the crushing reminder: one wild and precious life. It is like, “duh.” And yet, it is also like, maybe the air nipping at my ankles as my pants move with my step is a gift after all, drawing me out of false feelings of stagnation and urging me forward; as if to say: there is more to come— more, better, delightful, bittersweet, unfathomable at this moment, but soon to be known.
I have been trying to practice staying present and re-narrativizing my thoughts. When I am feeling in a rut with my to-do list and struggling with executive function freeze (you know, slipping into waiting mode), I am now trying to course correct with my thoughts: I don’t have to do anything, but I want to do [insert agonizing-might-as-well-be-mount-everest-task-of-the-day]. Getting to study as my job is a privilege2, and how lucky am I to get to spend my days learning and preparing myself to share this gift with others?
When I read this poem, I also find myself hung up on a feeling I can only describe as a knot of jealousy. Like when you admire something in someone else, but know you don’t have it, you struggle with it, or they’ve just got it in an effortless way that you can’t match— I don’t know how to pay attention. How to fall down into the grass, how to be idle, or how to take a stroll and question, well, what else should I have been doing?
I’m always thinking about what I should be doing. And that’s difficult when the should’s are also the things that I recognize are privileges, as well as the things I want to do so well that I paralyze myself with the fear of doing them badly and then don’t do them at all. No good!3
I am finding myself busy again after a year and a half of intentionally un-busying myself. I like the idea of knuckling my knees into the grass and pondering a blade of grass. I know this is what we’re really made for. (By who? I’m not sure that matters.) But I am just a [modern] girl, and I don’t know what 1992 was like (I was still 8 years away from entering this plane of existence) or what it’s like to be 57 (that’s how old Mary Oliver was when she wrote The Summer Day), and maybe Mary Oliver would’ve had different things to say if she had been on Instagram since she was 12 years old.
Nobody knows how growing up on the internet is going to affect us. I am an academic in training, fighting myself to sit down and read about the things I’m genuinely curious about. And I love reading. I love the things I’m studying. But I also never learn my lesson about getting caught in a good doomscroll.
The other day, at my grandparents house, we were eating lunch and playing the New York Times word games together. All of us— Boomers and Zoomers, with our phones out at the table, chewing and tap tap tapping. Then I look over and my grandpa is watching reels on Instagram! My shock led to a discussion (phones still out, trying to get to genius— IYKYK) wherein my grandparents said they both get sucked into the doomscroll and black hole of reels.
My grandparents, though, do lots of things that feel like Mary Oliver’s summer day. They garden, collect rocks and tumble them into beautiful thumby-things, discover long-lost relatives on Ancestry, read books before bed, and do crafts just to do them.
Maybe, though, that’s still not the stillness Mary Oliver is reflecting on. And maybe its hard to comprehend in my September 2000 brain because I’ve barely known a day not being rushed by the expectation to do or complete— to work towards something with purpose wherein “purpose” is defined and measured by utility.
But I feel my animal urge to be rid of utility despite my Instagram-warped brain. My attempt at honoring this has been investing in more hobbies, which just means that I’m busier than ever and I don’t make as much progress on anything.
But/And there it is again! The idea that I have to be doing something for the sake of “progress”, but really hobbies are just meant to be done to do! To enjoy! I know this, I know this… and yet…
[We/you/I] only have one wild and precious life, and here [we/you/I] [are/am] stuck between my shoulds and wants. It’s January and in St. Louis some days the temps are in the single digits, so there’s no kneeling down in the grass for me… not anytime soon. But I am wrestling with this point which poets, especially seem to be trying to get through our thick internet-fried skulls: that the grass is where we should be. And yet the grass is what [I/we/you] resist. And why? For what? I don’t know, and yet I know.
Literally bought a brick [Monday, Jan 22]
One of Greenville’s coolest people, bikefluencer and local advocate, “Bike Mary” posted about this 3D printed “brick” and said it was awesome. I’d been seeing ads for it and thought, “No way I’d spend $50 on a plastic brick that blocks apps on my phone.” And let this be the proof that influencers do, in fact, work because I bought it immediately after seeing Mary’s story.
I should also say that I’ve been particularly down bad with my phone addiction recently. It started with seeking more connection with my friends in different places as I adjusted to a new home, then continued as my procrastination dopamine hit of choice, and then got unruly with the absolute amount of free time I found myself with in my month and a half of time away from school over winter break.
As much as the haters on Reddit say, “just delete the apps on your phone”, “just set a screen time limit”, or “just don’t let yourself be addicted to your phone”4, I wish it was that simple to just quit my phone/internet addiction. It’s obviously not, especially not in today’s social and cultural climate where so much of our community-building, communication, and awareness about what’s going on around us happens behind a few icons on our phones and whose platforms are designed to keep your attention on them.
All to say, I was willing to try just about anything at this point.
I’ve had my brick for about a week now. I set it so it blocks apps that tend to suck my attention away. Before I head out for school, when I need to get some work done at home, and before I get into bed, I tap my phone on the brick which I keep on my fridge (it’s magnetic). It’s not a perfect solution. I still pick up my phone out of habit, looking for something to scratch my dopamine itch, only to realize there’s nothing to do on my phone. But it creates more of a barrier— one I can’t just bypass with “remind me in 15 minutes.”
I know it sounds ridiculous. I feel ridiculous needing a device to make my device dumber, but this is the closest I’ve gotten to setting realistic boundaries with my phone and the internet.
I still dream about getting a candy-bar dumb phone sometimes, but I’m not ready to go full granola luddite. So the brick will do for now!
Nothing like a hard week to remind you you’re just an animal at the end of the day [Friday, Jan 26]
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday and a little bit of Thursday having the kind of big cries that remind you you’re alive and breathing and moving forward all the time whether you want to or not.
I cry pretty often— maybe like once a week, but it’s usually the kind of cry that comes from a sweet reel I saw on Instagram or a quick frustrated teariness. This was the kind of cry that left my eyes noticeably red for a few days. A kind of whole body heaviness. The kind where even your favorite things (pasta, popcorn, two naps in one day, binge-watching Survivor) don’t even saturate the dullness that has settled.
I started seeing a therapist this week too— about an hour before the event that set the rest of my week off kilter— and she said I say an awful lot of “should’s” when talking about myself. Her homework to me was to practice letting go of should’s and to allow myself to feel my feelings. I didn’t realize I’d be practicing this so soon.
By Friday I’d dropped a class and turned my attitude around about how to approach the math homework that was sending me into a fury. I let myself feel my big feelings and I tried not to intellectualize them. I usually label my feelings in my head as a way to brush them off and move on quickly, but this time I sat with them…
Well, I let myself sob as I ran to Cyclebar in the rain, I let myself pedal as hard as I could and grimaced at my reflection in the mirror for 45 minutes, and then I laid in bed with the lights off as I listened to “Deep Sleep Piano” on Spotify, letting my mind run without judgement until I fell asleep without realizing.
I’m still working on the should’s. I’m still working on feeling my feelings. It’s going to take a lot of practice to get out of self-judgement in the form of overthinking and holding onto difficult feelings. I’ve written in another blog about how I’ve been trying to practice daydreaming as an adult (its harder than you think) and I see these practices going hand-in-hand and my problems with them as an effect of self-judgement. Daydreaming (usually before I fall asleep) helps teach me how to ignore my own judgmental thoughts and helps me replace those torturous anxious narratives that keep us up at night with delightful, imaginative, and otherwise exciting thoughts and possibilities. It still saddens me to realize daydreaming, like writing or any other skill or craft, is a muscle that you’ve gotta keep moving or else it will atrophy.
I don’t want my imagination or my ability to feel my feelings or even my ability to rest to wither away before my brain has even fully developed. I wanna do more animal things like I was always meant to do… like Mary Oliver: go sit in some grass or stare at some walls and pray or something.
Bunker? I hardly know ‘er! [Saturday, Jan 27]
Today, I spent the afternoon with 12 other grad students at a research center about 30 minutes from WashU’s campus getting acclimated to the 2,000 acre environmental field station where we each get to practice embodied artistic research methods for the semester. We all come from different academic disciplines, and have different but intersecting interests. I think all of us identify as artists in varying ways and many of us are curious about memory, the intersections of the personal in scholarship, landscapes and history— just to name a few.
Over the course of the next few months we will spend time on our own at the research site practicing different methods and answering different questions of interest not for the sake of finding an answer, but for the sake of asking and practicing at all.
The research center (which shares space with a wolf preserve) usually hosts students doing environmental studies projects, but there’s lots of different ways to engage the space in interdisciplinary and totally-not-”hard”-science ways.
One of the things that drew me in was the fact that there are 52 bunkers from WWII on the site. Some of which have things in them, (Today, we saw one with an abandoned project by other students where they’d imagined what a bunker would look like if it were a bar and had dragged in couches and lights and dart boards. In another we saw a ridiculous amount of different sized rolly carts which you would’ve had to move like Tetris to even get to the back of the 20-yard bunker. I heard someone explaining that one we passed but didn’t go into had jars with sheep brain in them.) and some of them don’t. We’re invited to explore the grounds and the bunkers while experimenting with our practice and to consider using the space for our hypothetical projects.
I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to explore in my time at the research center, and I don’t know how I’ll use my bunker space if I decide to, but the not knowing is part of the process, and is largely the point.
I’m excited getting to learn how to approach a project in such an unfamiliar way compared to how I have been taught to orient myself to academic projects. I might use this as an excuse to get some reading done in a quiet and beautiful place. I also might practice creating (what I’m calling for lack of a better descriptor off the top of my head) a listening journal. I might experiment with photo essays alongside archival research. Maybe I’ll write a few poems. Who knows?!
For now, I’m enjoying the not knowing. I’m cultivating and trying to get comfortable in my curiosity (which is also a muscle.) And I’m looking forward to spending some time in the woods— hopefully successfully dancing my way around the ticks.
And apparently this poem is super popular and shared often, but I’d never read it until recently.
This especially is an important reminder to myself because education is a privilege that should be a right, and especially considering at this point I am overeducated, it is a massive privilege that shouldn’t be taken for granted, though I inevitably and regrettably do.
It’s funny reading this back because I wrote this mini essay before I had my therapy session where my therapist clocked me for being too hard on myself with the shoulds. It felt like such a revelation when she said it, but it’s clear I knew it all along. I *literally* wrote it out.
Massive eyeball to all of these, btw.