The other day my dad called me from work to ask how I’d been doing, and I told him that I hadn’t gotten up off the couch all day. And there was this pause on the other end of the phone, and then he said, carefully:
“so get up off the couch. Bundle up, go outside, go for a walk.”
Context: it was like two o’clock in the afternoon. I had slept straight through the previous night, almost woke up close to morning and lay in bed and tossed and turned and drifted for a bit and felt frustrated with myself for not being able to wake up until I finally managed to pull myself up and out of bed
— got dressed, walked downstairs, brushed my teeth, checked my phone, stood in the kitchen and just —-
didn’t want to face the world.
curled up on the living room couch, and went right back to sleep.
That’s where I was when my dad called me.
He stayed on the phone with me as I swung my feet over the side of the couch, stood up, went looking for my socks and shoes, my hat and coat,
a leash for the dog who kept curling up next to the couch and worrying
and my dad was just there and listening to me talking myself through each tiny little intermediate step towards getting outside. At one point, I needed both hands to tie my shoes or something and I needed to hang up. So I promised that I would let him know when I was out the door. It took me longer than I wanted it to, but I did it. I send him this picture:
And he just told me I’d done a good job.
We – Lara and I – walked for maybe a mile and a half or two. And with each step, it got a little easier.
Münster, Germany, is too small to deserve its own labeled dot on many maps. One can walk or bike anywhere in the city.
Like a lot of cities in Germany, Münster began with the construction of a church. As time went by, folks settled down and built their homes in the shadow of that church, and a village was born, and then the merchants came and traded around the edges. Just another stop along the river, by the harbor, before there were train stations and steam engines, back when a boat on the water was nifty shortcut that could change the shape of the world.
The oldest buildings and streets are in the center of the city, in downtown. Even as the city expanded and sprawled outwards, the oldest part of the city remained at the center, like a heart. It’s like looking at the rings of a tree. But it’s not a perfect cross section across time, because Münster, like a lot of places in Europe, did not escape the bombs, and humans had to rebuild in places.
As one does.
I can sit here and I can talk about taking a cross section of time. But since the beginning, there’ve been people taking the long way, moment by moment. For lifetimes.
So the city continues. Every week, there’s still a market in the square by the church. The streets come alive with people. Friends and lovers and children and street folks. Bakers behind the counters of cafés on every corner. On market days, butchers, gardeners. The invisible people who put up the posters on the walls under the bridges. Musicians. People drinking beer on the sidewalks, perusing the displays in the shop windows. People on bicycles, so many bicycles, everywhere you turn…
There’s a bicycle path in the shape of a ring, called the promenade, that loosely defines the edges of downtown. The bike path is lined with warm, globular street-lamps and old trees, and there’s a footpath along one side of it, and playgrounds and parks, and it cuts across streets every few hundred yards.
There is this one place where the promenade slopes down under a bridge. Bicyclists can stop peddling, for a moment, on the otherwise level path, and feel the wind in their faces and watch the bridge whoosh by above their heads before the peddles click back into gear, and begin to push back against gravity.
While I was in Münster, I read Kathrin a wonderful book in which witches swooped across the sky. I doodled them at Kathrin’s table and tried to write about them on napkins in coffee shops. They seemed – almost at home, in a place where the buildings and the culture were so beautiful and old. Almost.
When my fingers got cold holding onto the handlebars of a bike, I wondered if that’s what it would feel like to hold onto a broomstick.
When the sun had set and the mists crept out from behind the trees along the promenade, the air felt thick with magic.
When Alyssa’s hair and Kathrin’s coattails trailed out behind them as the three of us went flying down the hill and under the bridge on our bicycles, it was easy to pretend we were witches.
The earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse. Because the orbit is not a circle, the distance between the earth and the sun is not a constant.
Because of the way the earth’s axis is tilted, the amount of time that any point on the earth’s surface spends facing the sun depends on two things: 0. Latitude 0. The earth’s location in its orbit
The the length of daylight in the northern hemisphere is actually shortest when the earth is closest to the sun.
I have a vivid memory of a high school science teacher turning off all the lights and climbing up on top of a desk with a flashlight and a globe to demonstrate this phenomenon.
It’s almost the darkest day of the year.
“I like this one.”
“Eehhhh. It’s crooked near the bottom.”
“What about that one?”
“Isn’t it a bit tall? Plus, the needles are too sharp.”
“Look at that one over there!”
“Pffft. It’d never fit in the house.”
“THIS ONE!”
“It’s the perfect height!”
“Actually, it’s kind of lovely.”
And then, from the last of us:
“Yes, okay, but – look at that big gap in the middle, d’you see…”
Etc., etc., for the appropriate amount of time. Then:
“What about this one?”
“Ooo…”
“Loren?”
“I like it. Also, my toes are cold.”
“Mom? What do you think?”
A pause, and then an approving nod.
“…Okay, yeah. It’s a nice tree.”
And so it was settled.
We joined hands around the tree for a minute, and said something like a thank you. It’s a thing my family does.
This time, Evie cut it down. In one go. All by herself. She was all pink in the face and proud of herself, after. Then I picked up one end of the tree and dad grabbed the other, and we began the walk back up the hill to the barn.
People dressed in red and green appeared out of the woodwork to help my dad lift the tree and set it on top of the Jeep and strap it down, carefully, while the young ones snuck candy-canes into our coat pockets. And then we all piled into the car and drove, carefully, until we turned left into the driveway and were home.
And then it was time for the tree stand, and untangling ropes of Christmas lights, and carrying boxes down from the attic. Someone put a John Denver and the Muppets Christmas CD in the player. A stand mixer was retrieved from the depths of a cupboard, and a cookbook was flipped open to the correct page, and someone added
half a pound of sugar,
some vanilla,
a package of cream cheese, and
a tad less than a stick of butter
into the bowl, and mixed them up, and set it outside in the snow to chill.
And in the back of my head, I remembered other Decembers, a long time ago, when Sara was here, and we’d roll out cookie dough on the island in the kitchen and cut out the shapes of rabbits and snowmen and pine trees and angels, and you could tell the exact time they were ready to take out of the oven by the smell.
And then I looked up to see my little sister, who wasn’t little any more, standing at the kitchen counter and meticulously mixing drops of food coloring into the frosting until she’d found exactly the right shade, until she had a rainbow laid out in front of her.
And it was dark outside, because the days were shorter, for a while.
But on the inside there was joy, for just a moment, and the house smelled like cookies and pine needles.
And soon there will be familiar ornaments – old friends, almost forgotten – and my Dad will read the first stave of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
And I’ll stay up later than anyone else and I’ll set down my phone and I’ll lay on the couch and look at the lights on the tree and breathe in the smell of pine.
And it’s so dark outside. Dark, and cold, and forbidding. And there’s this stupidly illusive feeling that I almost remember from childhood, that I often think I should be feeling, when 101.3 switches over to their Christmas playlist, when the choir starts singing carols on the street. But it’s sometimes very, very hard to feel.
Until that moment. When it’s so dark outside that my sister insists that it’s time to get a tree. When the lights go up in the garden and around the edge of the front porch, not just at our house, but at every house in the town and across the city and around the world.
I’m not sure, but I think it’s a manifestation of an ancient, stubborn human impulse – to make our own light in the darkness, to strike a match against the cold. Even as we’re closest to the sun.
At the very beginning of an excellent children’s book – A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle – there’s a scene where Meg can’t sleep for worrying, so she goes downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of hot cocoa.
She found her little brother, and a saucepan of milk on the stove, and they were mostly exclusive about it.
Sometimes, when I’m alone in my own attic bedroom and I can’t sleep for worrying, I get up and go downstairs and make hot cocoa, and sometimes it helps.
This evening, I also made a largish batch of macaroni & cheese for the weekend, and cleaned up the kitchen, and listened to my parents’ Christmas CDs, and played with a dog who also kind of needed that.
Solace comes from the weirdest places. Sometimes the most effective act of self-soothing and a bad habit can be exactly the same thing. Sometimes the thing that you know you need to do to take care of yourself is the one thing that you know is going to hurt the most. Letting go, speaking out, turning around and going back, saying the words you’ve been keeping inside. Those moments can fucking sting like anything, and they’re also frequently the moments when the multiverse shifts and everything changes for good.
“It’s in every one of us to be wise. Find your heart, open up both your eyes. We can all know everything without ever knowing why. It’s in every one of us, by and by…”
~ John Denver
Never stop changing, continue to grow, do the uncomfortable things over and over again until you are comfortable being uncomfortable. You are constantly becoming.
And – somehow, at the same time -remember that it is also okay to rest, to set down the burdens for just a little while. They’ll be there later, when you come back, if you choose to. Take a moment to just be where you are, and appreciate the little things. It’s all we’ve got, you see. And at the same time, it’s everything.
✨
When I was very little, I used to fall asleep in the back of the car on long car rides at night, and I can remember my dad scooping me up and carrying me up the front steps and into the house. Specifically, I remember his whiskers, I remember his footsteps, the gravel of under his shoes and the creaking of the hinges of the front door.
We used to look up at the stars, and feel so small.
It’s an unexpectedly comforting perspective.
“It is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates, on a minor planet, orbiting an average star, in the outer suburbs of one among a hundred billion galaxies. But, ever since the dawn of civilization, people have craved for an understanding of an underlying order of the world. There ought to be something very special about the outer conditions of the universe. And what can be more special than that there is no boundary. There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.”
~ Stephen Hawking, in the movie The Theory of Everything, muchhh paraphrased
