I'll meet you in the low tide
My friend Mark emailed me last week. “Aren’t we about due for an Unfurling?” he asked. “Damnit, Mark!” I responded. I was hoping no one had noticed.
I’ve been clenched up, sealed off. Like a car fan on the recirculate setting — no fresh air coming in, no flow. Every thought I think, a counter-thought stands ready to dismantle it. I can’t get any traction, any forward motion. I’m just recycling my own air in my own bubble, even as it grows more and more toxic.
Winter’s always tough for me, but this one is off the charts. Maybe you’re feeling it too. This long year of retraction, of shrinking back from each other, is taking its toll.
Our collective attention has been focused on our physical health — the things we need to do to keep these bodies of ours alive. When mental health gets a nod from the media, it’s usually in the context of the most egregious problems: spiking suicidal ideation among young people and the big jump in overdose deaths. These things are real and tragic. And I think they’re only the visible tip of a submerged iceberg. A whole hell of a lot of us are suffering.
Volvation is a defensive behavior practiced by some animals, such as armadillos, pangolins, and hedgehogs, in the face of a threat. They curl themselves tightly into a ball and present only their hardest parts or spines to a predator. It feels as if we’ve all been engaged in volvation for months and months now, retracting further into ourselves, presenting our spikiest thorns of judgment and anger and accusation to the world as we hang on, trying to survive.
I’m so tired of it. I want to unfurl. I want to relax into the world again, feel my molecules mingling with the air without fear or shame.
But now my breath is a weapon, I’m told, a loaded gun I can’t set down that at any moment could kill me or someone I love or the stranger across the room. So we seal it off, our breath, this process by which we absorb and emit the stuff of life on earth. Wrap it in cloth, one layer, now two, back up, hunker down, separate, separate, further, now further.
Unity was the theme of Biden’s inaugural speech. And I gotta say, I’m starving for it. I can’t squeeze myself away any more tightly, or for very much longer.
Because this retraction hasn’t just been physical. When we can’t come together, feel ourselves sharing time and space, reality starts to splinter. Our rhythms can’t entrain; we’re billions of clocks ticking asynchronously. I do not see what you see. What you see is unfathomable to me. I see only the inside of my own bubble, breathe my own recycled, concentrated air.
I keep coming back to this image of low tide. The ocean, retracted, sucked into itself, the ugly beach laid bare, littered with jagged shells and sharp stones and limp, dead things.
I hope this is low tide. The held breath, the pause before we start rolling forward again, washing onshore. Not to cover up what’s been exposed, but to comfort and cleanse it.
I hope we can remember how to do it. I see some people posting online about how we mustn’t ever again expose ourselves so carelessly to each other’s germs, how we mustn’t risk coming together again until all danger of sickness has been eradicated. (In other words, never.)
It’s a similar quandary facing us politically — is it possible to rebuild trust? To find our way back to each other, to a shared reality, even a little bit? What might happen if we expose our vulnerable parts to each other again?
I don’t know. But I’m willing to risk it. Because the alternative is grim. Coming together will always carry the possibility of being hurt, but staying separated assures it. Vulnerability is the tradeoff for connection. The cost of absolute safety is loneliness, madness, living sealed off from the air we all share.
I can’t live in a defensive crouch. If the lion eats me when I uncurl, then my molecules will become the lion’s, which will become the earth’s.
Breathe in, breathe out. Let the tide roll in.
Speaking of Low Tide, that just happens to be the name of a lovely song by one of my favorite musical discoveries of 2020, the band Drama. Here's a groovy live rendition.
If you dug the emo nature of this newsletter, you'll love this mini-essay by Heather Havrilesky. Here's a lil' taste: "Now I need to honor my own cells instead. Animals don’t blame themselves for breathing, or tell themselves that their needs are toxic. Animals walk out into the cold air and follow the odd logic of their heartbeats through the dark hills, breathing in without requiring a blessing, breathing out without requiring absolution."
And on a much more practical and medical note, here's an article I wrote for Elemental on the risk/benefit analysis for people with autoimmune conditions looking at whether to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.
That's all for now, folks! I'd love to hear from you, wherever you are. One of my favorite things since starting this newsletter has been hearing from subscribers both familiar and unknown. (I've heard from folks from Scotland to Portland to Denver!) If you're so inclined, I'd love to know how you're doing, how you're feeling, and what you're yearning for in the year ahead.
In the meantime, I'll be over here beaming out all the light I've got.
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