It is summer in the city (sort of). There are still sweaters and scarves about, but I spent the whole day at a barbeque in the park last weekend, and there summer was as real as anything else.
I’m feeling a little uneasy at this turn of the seasons. I spent the last few months praying for summer, and now it's finally here. All the Montreal babes are in their little outfits and my bicycle can take me anywhere I want in fifteen minutes flat. And yet, I am stroking summer tentatively as if I’m petting a wild animal, ready to withdraw my hand at any moment.
At the end of summer last year, I was at a dinner party in a magical fairy garden of a balcony. Grape vines scaled up every corner giving it this secluded and mystical feel. My roommate's cat had run away just the day before and I had spent the good part of the sweltering heat looking under neighbors' stoops and shaking treats into the void. No cat. I decided that I needed to take a break, and there I was at the dinner party sipping on cherry cider and eating fried sweet plantains and jollof rice.
I asked what everybody’s word of the summer was.
A said, I can’t think of the word.
I said, let me try. I’m good at these things–describe it to me.
It’s almost like productive, but less regimented and capitalist.
Generative.
Yes! That’s it.
*we dap each other up in mutual satisfaction*
Like a spell, that dinner party lifted some curse. I returned home and decided to search for Chidi (the cat) again. Like an angel, a neighbor offers me his best flashlight. I shined it under the porch and bright yellow eyes were looking right back at me. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
Now it is May, the start of it all again. Life is generating and it’s inviting me to join along with it. Could I burst open in the way I wanted to? Could I be as expansive as the foliage making its yearly pilgrimage up the side of buildings and telephone wires? It felt like a lot of pressure. In the winter, there is nothing one must do but die. But now, there were places to be, things to create, loved ones to gather with.
I ask myself all these questions and more knowing that it is futile. Time passes and seasons change whether I’m ready for it or not. In the middle of the night when the leaky faucet drips on the second like a ticking clock I think to myself, this is it, this is time moving. It could be a great weight on my shoulders, or some miracle.
I suspend all expectations for as long as I can muster. Knowing myself to be exactly where I need to be.
I’m writing again, it is something new. I took a long hiatus where the only things I could write were the newsletter and little poems here and there. It was frustrating to say the least. Even for a month, it made me feel like an imposter, a nobody. I didn’t have a secret anymore. I wasn’t complicated or special. There were many dramatic stories like this that grew like shadows as the sun went down. When the well dries up it feels like it could be that way forever. I could admire the steam rising from the boiling water on the stove, but it felt disjointed from everything else. The symmetry wasn’t making itself as readily available. I was doing things as if they were a great burden and not a part of the dance. I would read and then get annoyed that they had written a book and I had not yet. It was a raging sticky jealousy. Oh god, the drama. You only realize how funny these things are in retrospect.
Creative practice and spiritual practice are really one and the same. This is not a new or profound statement, but every time I realize this it feels like the first time. You need patience, self-compassion, flow, and discernment. Knowing when to apply pressure, and knowing when to let Jesus take the wheel, so to speak. (A Carrie Underwood song that I was moved to tears by when I first heard it on the radio at six. I was a big Jesus-head back then).
It occurred to me that the only thing you need to know about life is this. When to surge forth in your power, and when to retreat back in and let some mysterious force take over. Creating is like this, finding that point of least resistance and like a Jenga piece pushing your finger up against it as it slides out easily.
Taylor Swift will re-release her Speak Now album on my best friend's birthday. Hopefully, with more unreleased tracks about how torturous it is to be nineteen loving a man that is 12 years older than you (Dear John and the like). I was listening to Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve late one night and was thinking to myself that I think it is worth it to have lost some part of your innocence about the world, just to sing, “give me back my girlhood, it was mine first” and really really mean it. Singing this with such fever, ugly-crying alone in my room, allowed something to fold over. And so I began writing again.
It’s hard not to get too attached when that intangible creative feeling lands on your doorstep like a gift. If I could, I would bottle it up and save it for later. Ration it out and make it last a while. But, I think I’ve learned by now that when you treat things as if they are scarce, scarce they become. It is summer after all, there is more than enough to go around.
Maybe this time, when it leaves again I’ll let it go quietly. I won’t make a fuss, knowing that it will be on its way back again soon.
I remind myself that these are just the rhythms of life and the best things enter in with almost no effort at all. Life is re-generating, and when I’m ready I will follow suit.
With no expectations, life can be sweet. (and so forth)
Love you to the moon and back, to infinity and beyond.
-Thai xx