Faith

Meandering thoughts on faith, grief and the hibernating parts deep winter brings

Formless January, the air is frigid as I walk a few minutes down the way to Prison Taco.

When in doubt, pick up a book. Brilliant advice. I walk with my fresh new book towards food, trusting in both sources power to nourish me.

I guess it’s time to grieve, I neutrally think mid-way through dinner.

The long, lonely, dark nights of winter are true now, though it felt like they might be over, or have even not begun. Now, I see, that January is the start. When I look three months ahead in time, it can’t encompass the long expanse that winter brings. The long, cruel, dark nights where I better find my faith. Three months is often the blink of an eye. But each day and night must be lived in all its pain and beauty. In my mind’s seeking to know what will be after three months of time, all context is removed. Context is the molding clay I so frequently put down, instead trying to use my mind’s power of crafting and harnessing alone. It’s a futile and blind use of “power,” one that exhausts itself. Context is in my body, shaped from experience of feeling the entirety of the circle. Being able to objectively take a pov from farther above to sense the largeness of any given situation, relationship, fear or truth; to find continuities between seed, root and bloom; rather than squander (not without smaller gains of understanding how the mind works) my toiling, racing mind in the darkness it exists in.

The context of my immediate reality: how my body inhabits itself within it, what my eyes absorb, how to let my mind go and use my senses to spark curiosity, is sometimes hard to access. Some days easier to access. Mostly it’s a day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment practice of accessing the subtle, sensing body and truly remembering it is the contextual clay of how I mold my experience of time.

I’m cuter bundled up, I think. Some beautiful people are meant to have their skin and décolletage on full display, every angle absorbed, seen. I’m cuter bundled up in a large scarf, my hat giving my face a nice shape and my nose sticking out with a subtle, last minute curve. One day I’ll be pretty, I hope. One day I’ll have given myself over to enough faith that I’ll have made it to where I was hoping I’d get to. One day, one day.

Now, waiting for my food at Progresso, with the Mexican ballads softly spilling over the speakers, the chefs singing along, a father and daughter to dinner behind me, my surroundings shift to dusty roads and tan dirt. The warmth of the dust and dirt and sun and shade pierce through the fluorescent lights and dark blue night peeking through the open kitchen door;

the sparkly dust illuminated by the sun lightly glows from my heart for a second.

Then I hear the father and daughter talking about schools she’s considering applying to and a tinge of grief pulls at me. The numb salve that coats the walls of my most tender self lets the truth envelop me. I’ll never have that again with my father. His counsel. His mind His presence. However many words we didn’t or couldn’t exchange, sometimes his presence was comforting enough. The many sharp pains of the inability to communicate with a parent dissipate with this thought. That sometimes, just being with him felt enough of a safety for me in this world.

I felt like he knew what I was after. There was never any pressure from him to be anyone or do anything. Just gentle encouragement. Not even invested encouragement, just gentle happiness that I was awake in the world.

I can’t remember our last lucid conversation. One comes to mind of us getting pizza, as we always did, when I ordered arugula and he said arugula was for horses and I chuckled because maybe he was right but I can eat the darn stuff by the handful I enjoy it so much. I think I was visiting from school and it was just us. And it felt easy to share with him. Like I was meeting an old friend. He just wanted to hear about what was up with me, saying ‘good, good’ after sharing this and that, this and that, with him.

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Our pizza dates devolved slowly. I would bike to his apartment, having carved spacious time to be with him, then we’d walk over to Amazza. It was fun having him in the city. He liked being around people. Absorbing the happenings, the town gossip; his sweet face and general curiosity made him a trusted keeper of secrets and happenings in neighbor’s lives.

We would meet and our dates would get quieter, him slowly losing the ability to communicate without my knowing. I would order for us from the same wiry little Irish guy, wondering if he could also sense the unnamable devolution. During dinner I would just hold in my hot tears as hard as I could. Turning away from him in shame because I couldn’t understand the silence, nor our dynamic. I never truly could, but I often accepted his silence as presence. Slowly that silence was no longer presence, but true absence. I would sit there overwhelmed with emotion that I couldn’t name; maybe it was that absence in his eyes usually with a subtle twinkle of his spirit. A disconnect associated with the deterioration of his brain? That sentence doesn’t encapsulate how a disease sits in context with emotion, with relationship; as the clay that shapes our going forward.

And he was there, when I look back on life, though not as an oracle guide (which I feel I needed most) but as a quiet barrier to the outside world. Not one that kept me energetically safe, but almost a guide akin to a seasoned driver. Quiet, unobtrusive, curious if I’m comfortable: hot, cold? Enjoying the duties of driving, enjoying the ride itself. Not totally invested with the passenger but responsible for her and enjoying that responsibility. Not someone I could debrief with, but someone who had predictability and flow that did allow safety to be felt.

Now when I read old journals and he’s in there, I realize he was alive at one point. But the grief in my body can’t access those memories of his aliveness. I can hear his sweet voice but I can’t really go there fully. I can’t really picture what I’ve lost of him otherwise I don’t know how I’ll manage the day.

Here at prison taco, I’m happy I made the decision to come eat here. I like using my legs to go somewhere. I like when there’s some place cozy to walk to from my house. The sudden cold and darkness makes me feel like I could be in any city, anybody. I could glimpse again a self I feel while traveling, while out in the world, and that connects me to my dad. In the last year of his ability to speak, I would get him a Guinness mid day at lunch and all he would try and do was get the stories of his life out to me as best he could.

*

Enveloped in winter and it feels like I’ve always been here. The vastness of summer: the slow rise, quick but delusional peak, then the meandering close of it is wiped from me. This perpetual winter, similar to anytime I ride a school bus: my body is within the experience of every time I’ve ever ridden a school bus. Perpetual winter has me entering the spaces that were lost to me, re-finding my faith through intuitive choosing of books, the endless re-organizing of home so I may stand on better footing to clearly see the things that I need to urgently, but calmly, give my attention to.

The frozen nature of time in winter gives room for me to recapture all that is lost, or at least reflect on it. The solid, hibernating soil lets me ponder all that I want to move forward in time with. How I want to proceed. What I hope to warm in the ground.

And it’s this abstract dance with faith and the way I have to listen to my thoughts and body to start to see what I need to pay attention to in this moment, so I may dream for what I hope can bloom from the dark.

A lot of the seeds I peruse over in my palm hold their own worries and hopes. Stemming from is this it? A sinking existential dread I’m sure we all come upon. And If this is all their is, what resources do I have to make it better, more beautiful?

Is this the life I want? (A privileged, American thought, but not one that doesn’t have value) If life is what you do everyday, am I doing the things that define what I want my life to be?

Am I finding wonder, am I looking to connect the threads that keep running without me, waiting always with patience for my return ? Is my work just coming back to this place, this winter where words of others help guide me through the robbed light that provokes fear?

Is my work just chasing after my own thoughts, trying to pin down what I’m feeling now and why, and placing that in the collection of what others are thinking, feeling, tapping into in this moment and the past?

These funny seeds that sometimes stay as obsessive, myopic fears can also shape shift with different light given to them. Like taking them into a book with me, illuminating them to other artist’s words and thoughts. They start to be chewable, chapters start to define themselves. Thoughts start to have a place to be explored, placed in context, rather than worried into a universe of their own.

That worry transforms into excitement, a desperate hope that I have enough time to hone my skills in extracting my own thoughts and find a container for them to exist with others, to digest and translate my own interpretations of it all. Then I remember this is why I can only work so much, because I need to find these rituals of being. Then I remember January is always this ripe time to close off and open up within. Go looking inside my tunnels, resume the search for my gold.

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I leave these meandering thoughts here as an archive for myself, I hope you follow ;) These essays might turn into something a bit more concise one day. But as I grapple with wanting to express in a timely manner and provide an archive of what I was thinking and when, why, I leave these semi unfinished thoughts on my substack and will continue to. Hope it all makes sense <3

I’ll also leave you with a quote on grief from a substack I found randomly, but whose writing captured grief and time so eloquently. I read it right when I got home from Prison taco, in the midst of getting my thoughts about my dad down into words:

Grief is different when you are young. It doesn’t carry as much weight. It’s like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering mass as it goes…

I can barely speak for myself because how does one even begin to know who we are? This is an aside, because the side stories are also important, but coming back, grief is a weight that grows. Anyone who has lifted weights know that if you slowly add weight you will be able to wow yourself with an ever increasing load, but even though you are able to bear it, larger loads can lead to bigger hurt. That load of grief you carry will never grow smaller. You will just get stronger. And that load of grief you forget you’re carrying because you're so used to it suddenly makes itself known when you twist funny.

And so, to protect ourselves from this, we notice what hurts us. And we bury ourselves in the things that protect us from adding to that potential pain. But the thing is, as my therapist said to me so brilliantly in a conversation we were having about this recently, “Grief and gratitude live as a team in my brain.” And so the more that we avoid the grief and build up tools to prevent ourselves from experiencing it, the less gratitude that we feel. And isn’t gratitude just the big kid word for wonder? Like when you see a murmuration don’t you just feel like the luckiest person alive? That silver thread vibrates hard. Time becomes outside of you.

1. Source: Looking for wonder Essay, Rachel Hiltsley

   Looking for wonder

Thanks for reading <3