In the Flow of Ink: Sorting Through Chaos

Dear Community,

Years ago when I was pregnant, before I lost the pregnancy, I shared my good news with my closest friends. I couldn’t help it. I knew that most people chose to wait until the risk of miscarriage decreased just after the 1st trimester, but I was too happy to contain it. My emotions felt too true to hide. Weeks later, when I had to share my sad news—my grief—a part of me felt ashamed. I felt guilty that I put my friends in a position that they would now need to console me. I worried that with the pandemic and the many horrible things going on in the world, that my pain was just too much for them. I worried I was burdening my friends with my suffering. 

And yet, on some level, I was grateful I didn’t have to grieve alone. 

Today I am unable to read the news or scroll through Instagram without feeling anxious, sad, afraid, angry, or some combination of all of these. My body is my biggest truth-teller, producing symptoms before I am fully cognizant of the feeling. Eyes swell with tears, chest aches, breath shallows. I am aware of the increased pressure of my blood pumping against my stiffened arteries. Violence, oppression, genocide, terror, greed, inhumane, unjust government corruption ripple and circulate beyond border constructs and into our blood stream, destroying families, destroying lives.

As I process my own personal struggles against this current backdrop of global suffering, I try to reach towards what is life-giving. 

It’s the practice of writing that has become a way to sort through and make some sense of a world (even when the world doesn’t make sense.) Writing helps me to see what I haven’t yet seen, to know what I didn’t know I knew. It feels like a tool of magic to me at times, a bridge between outer and inner spaces, between the imaginative and generative, between writer and reader. 

When things feel out of control in our lives and in the world (because they are) maybe rather than grasping, clutching, gripping, we need to let go of that imagined control so that we can create a new way. Creativity feels like the opposite of control. Being present feels like the opposite of anxiety. Love, the opposite of fear. 

A few weeks ago as I walked downhill along the partially paved road that I take from my home in the campo (literal translation: field) to the village below I began feeling my grandmother Ruby’s presence. Of course, this could also be described as thinking—I began thinking of my grandmother Ruby. Perhaps. But rather than a thought I could comprehend or trace back to an earlier provocation, this experience felt like a part of her being was in the presence of my body. That it originated beyond my mind and arrived only as energy.

The first time this occurred, it quite literally stopped me in my tracks. I sensed a sort of haunting comfort. My grandma has always been a source of unconditional love for me, which in reality, is the only form of love, because what is love if it comes with conditions? 

When I sensed Ruby’s energy in the middle of the road in the middle of the field in the middle of my walk it wasn’t as if I had a memory of her pop into my mind. Because a memory is situated in the past, and sensing someone’s presence is just that, it is what is present. 

The second time this happened I felt something more sacred. I paused and observed my surroundings. Was it this exact location where I had felt her last time? I took note of the avocado trees, the flowering cactus plants, the lingering scent of jasmine from the wall of vines just above me, the folding of the road through the round bend of the hills—none of this seemed familiar to me or to my grandparents’ home in Louisiana. Why would I feel her presence now?

As I continued walking I tried to hold onto this feeling of loving presence but felt it fade from my awareness as I continued along the road.

Subsequent times walking up and down this hill I attempted to summon the spirit of Ruby, or at least create an opportunity for noticing her. Indeed, for many walks I could drop into this sense of pureness, this connection to something beyond this environment, to a deeper love that perhaps is always there, if only I can anchor into the awareness to notice it. 

I don’t know if there is any significance to where I am now and my ability to feel my grandmother’s energy. I wonder at times if I have some connection to this land, or she did, or does. I love the idea of a homecoming. I love the idea of no borders. I love the idea of a maternal energy comforting all of us. 

I choose to take pleasure in mystery and in the divine moments that we cannot explain. I delight in the supernatural, the metaphysical, the transcendent. Maybe I was out there searching for comfort in the fields, maybe I was desperate for it, for this moment of maternal love.

For a moment of connection, of belonging to something and to someone.