To Turn

Notes from the File on Trekking and Truth

(The Girl with the Pearl, J. Vermeer)

Happy Fall Friends! I’m squeaking out a September letter despite only just getting back to things --- back to my desk, back to the mess, back to all the impossible, intractable unsolvables!

The excellent part is being back in my cedar closet. It occurred to me that it’s high time I give you all a preliminary report on the ongoing project here concerning ‘the file’ because, although I’m having a smash-up time digging for treasure, I have to admit to being a tad overwhelmed by the organizational aspect of this task. Indeed, I struggle with all forms of organization – my physical space, my mental processes and it’s as if an asteroid hit my time management. I got the genes for messy, confused and late! That said, I’m still hopeful I can unpack this stuff and arrange it somehow without having to halt for two years to get a master’s degree in library science.

(Stacks of French Novels, V. Van Gogh)

For any newcomers, first a warmest welcome to you! I’m so grateful for every one of you, my dear readers. And let me quickly summarize for you what this file is all about: it’s something I wrote about in my first letter (Come Cont’d) and is nothing less than the inspiration for this Substack.

‘The file’ is a place I put everything I learned during the impossible years --- when my mom was losing her mind, and my sister was dying and then in the aftermath of their deaths a handful of months apart in 2016. You can think of it as an archive really, a collection of wisdom ---- a place where art and faith and pain meet and speak.

My plan was that as I unpacked it here in my sleepy beach town (I moved here last year from NYC…), I would read it all again, relish it all again and thank it all too, from the bottom of my heart, and then turn the best stuff into letters for you.

You may have noticed that in advance of having it all unpacked and sorted, I’ve published a handful of stories. Don’t get your knickers in a twist, sweethearts. All roads lead back to the file. There’s no real daylight between me and it. Some of what I write here at Coming to the Nuisance will be pulled directly from the file and some will be simply breathed from the archival air. The file, c’est moi.

I remember in the aftermath of my mom and sister’s deaths, sitting on my grief counselor’s tiny couch in her midtown office, my head bent forward in those shaking kind of sobs saying, “I’m down to the studs, Natasha…I’m down to the studs...” It did feel like I was undergoing some kind of wild gut renovation, of my whole person, of my life. Only the supporting beams remained of the original me.

I also remember how desperately I wished to negate what was happening inside of me; I assumed I’d be very sad but not revved up like a spinning top intent on making homemade yogurt with a clenched jaw. A numb, hyper vigilant, hungover Julia Child I was.

This was the kicker --- in my mind’s eye, I could picture a Poised-Version-of-Me in a parallel universe who was doing quite well under the circumstances --- suffering, yes, but nobly, prayerfully. She drank hibiscus tea and read the psalms. She did not have four cups of coffee in the morning and three (huge) glasses of wine every night. This irritating avatar stalked my conscience and invariably made the real me feel extra-miserable —— she had perspective and was well aware that most of the world suffers much worse stuff than you do. I tried in vain to course correct, to hawk some poise, to get myself ‘in order’. But attempts to do that only increased my shame and that tended to increase all the other unhelpful behaviors too.

I’ll say two quick things here about this difficult portrait of me: the first is that grief and trauma are not the same thing, and I’d only accounted for the former.

The second and maybe more important thing is this: the actual truth was that I was a wreck and it’s utterly pointless to do anything about the truth except to turn toward it. Let me pause here briefly to discuss this because it’s honestly so central to any good endeavor.

When I think of the word truth a handful of things pop to mind: God, of course, first. But then a random list pops to mind --- bird migration, Meryl Streep, olives and apples, Everest, a perfectly cooked egg, War and Peace, Tom Petty, Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl. A few menacing ones follow: prison, riptides, North Korea, Pompeii.

You can try to outrun the true things. You can argue or shrink back. But you’re only wasting time and life.

However maddening, discomfiting, exasperating and terrifying the truth might be to us matters not one tiny purple potato. Arguing about the truth is like arguing with bedrock. Or wildfire. The truth will not be sacked. It survives all the outside pressure and conflict and denial and human insanity and misery absolutely intact. Truth is never hysterical or smug or self-congratulatory either. It doesn’t have to be!

It always feels to me when I finally relinquish my side show of other lesser ideas and turn, that the truth was patiently waiting for me all along, as if sipping an Arnold Palmer on a porch swing reading a paperback. Addicts will attest that it sometimes runs after you. The fact is, like love, the truth is patient and kind. It will wait your whole life for you to turn.

This simple idea runs through the file like a river about to overflow its banks. We will return to it again and again like farmers returning to their fields, their seed, their harvest. And so, it was not until I truly accepted that I did not know how to move forward with my life without my sister, that I began to actually heal.

Now back to my file —- there’s one final thing about it that I want you to know. For now, let’s just put a pin in this because frankly, it needs to be the subject of a whole other letter. (and that’s the case for trauma too…)

What I need you to know is that the file is…how do I say this exactly? It’s kind of alive. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, at some point I realized, by golly, the stuff in there was real.

I bring this up here just so you know that the file shimmers. And as humans, I believe that one of our main jobs here on earth is to identify all the stuff that shimmers. To collect those things and share them around. And mostly to try ourselves to become a shimmering.

Now you’re probably thinking —- Ok. But can you define ‘shimmering’?

Ah. So sorry! Yes! I mean No! I wish I could! It’s subjective, you see. And it depends too on your ‘theory of the case’. Since I’m a Christian (my theory of the case being, in a word, Jesus), the things that shimmer for me are the things that make me feel like A. they reveal or reiterate that theory or B. they talk back to the lies Or C. if something functions like roast chicken or banana bread - that shimmers too. If it gets me out of flight/fright/freeze, it’s a shimmering.

If you’re familiar with the story of the servant girl Hagar in Genesis, who escapes into the wilderness frightened and alone, a shimmering makes me feel deep in my soul like she did when she said:

I see the God who sees me. (Genesis 16:13)

Now that you know a little bit more about the file, you can easily intuit from here my belief that --- yes, we all have a file. Mine might just be a little more messy than yours and maybe more of an active preoccupation.

With that said, let’s dig in and pluck something from my little living museum of hope. And it might surprise you what I pull here. It’s practically hiding in plain sight. I decided to kick us off here with a passage from a memoir that was published in 2012 and turned into a major motion picture with a release in December of 2014 --- Wild, by Cheryl Strayed.

Although some of what’s in the file may be a tad more esoteric or theological, this hails straight from Hollywood. Don’t be a snob, though. It was a great memoir! And it holds a special place in the file partly because of the timing of the movie release which was in the months directly after my sister’s diagnosis. Her old life had just died, and my old life had just died, when we found ourselves alone in her kitchen one terrifying morning, Strayed’s hike and the movie the subject of a meandering conversation about the upcoming weekend.

We were standing there, Lis in the t-shirt she’d slept in. She’d just done her first round of meds and her stupid blood thinner injection which was necessary because of some side effect of the chemo. I heard the hollow plastic echo of the spent needle hitting the medical disposal container which sound always briefly made me wish I were dead.

I think Wild was showing that weekend in the neighboring town and Lis wondered aloud if her son Jack, just fourteen, might want to see it. Might be too much of a chick flick for him, she said half to herself as she got two mugs down for coffee.

Lis stood at the counter, her bald head tilted as she thought about Strayed’s now-famous hike, and she said as she poured the coffee, You’re literally the only person I know who’s crazy enough to do something like that.

She was wrong, of course. I could no more hike that Pacific Crest Trail than I could solve the remaining issues surrounding Einstein’s relativity. But there was some part of it that was true -- simply in that she said it to me, and it stuck in my mind. Especially in those years when she was dying, Lis’ words could hit my heart like an arrow. I immediately and most desperately wished to live up to such a statement. To be crazy stupid brave.

The passage I’m sharing here is the final passage of Strayed’s book. And I suppose it means much more if you’ve read the whole story up until that point and you know all the grief she’s suffered herself in losing her mom, the scattering of her family and siblings in the wake of it, a painful divorce and a frightening addiction.

Of course, on the hike she’d also overcome one impossible wilderness obstacle after another and met all these souls out there, they too all looking for the shimmerings, and read her favorite book of poetry at night in her one-woman tent with her headlight, burning the pages as she read, to lighten her pack as she moved on through the days and the landscapes.

She seemed to admit to herself on the journey that she’d also been brought down to the studs. Maybe Strayed built herself back up with the PCT in the way that I built myself back with my file.

In any event, here’s the passage. It’s from the day she finished the hike and she’s grappling with what the whole thing might ultimately mean. Now and again, I would pull it out of the file and read this passage, during the impossible years and even now. It always gives me peace and a kind of power, and invariably brings me back to the porch. It helps me to turn. And it helps me to remember too that life, in itself, is a shimmering and chief among them:

It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life ---like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

How wild it was, to let it be.

---

Truth: Not only do I think we all have a file. I think we all have a PCT. Little did I know when Lis said those words to me that morning in her kitchen that I was already on mine. And she on hers.

Tip: Occasionally, I’d have an issue waking up one of my boys in the morning for high school. If it dragged on, I would stride into his room holding a speaker and cranking an iconic song from my youth. My all-time fave for this exercise: Mary Jane’s Last Dance (live), Tom Petty. What a way to start the day. For both of us. I miss it.

Tote: Hibiscus tea