This weekend I took a walk in a forest blanketed with pale crepe-paper leaves. And I thought of the Robert Frost poem. People tend to focus on the moral of it: "I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference." But that's an ending, a look back. That's the writer's purview, of course. But what's always stuck with me was the opening pause:
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Long I stood. It's the pause, the wonder. That phrase has haunted me for years; I kept trying to write a meditative story on the paralysis of choice, with that phrase as its title. Choice doesn't have to paralyze, but we don't need to rush the choice either. We can take a pause, take a breath, knowing we are only one traveler. Long we can stand, before we choose our next path. I grew up in a small town but I'm a city girl. As an introvert, the only way I can keep loving the city is to leave it every now and again. To visit the other path. It's not an either-or, though. It's both. We need both. It's the contrast that makes it matter, like how music has to be about change--otherwise it's just noise.
This weekend I practiced Shinrin Yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, to let the sound and the feel, the smell and the taste of the forest wash over you. To take your path slowly and with intention.
I've been thinking about what March means. It's a month of transition, of shucking winter off, of stomping through the mud until we reach a warm rebirth. It's also a time of griefs, many griefs. It was March 2000 when we found out the cancer had returned, even after a bone marrow transplant. It was March 2020 when my city shut down, when writers who had shaped my world began dying around us. It was March 2021 when we grieved a year of isolation and loss. March 2023 had myriad griefs for me. March 2024 had the grief of watching people I thought were friends lionize men who celebrated the destruction of my people, my family. March 2024 was when I finally began the conversation of starting on antidepressants, when the griefs were too numerous to hold. March is also my birthday month.
The day before I left for my weekend away, I saw Redwood, a new musical about a woman who, unable to process her grief for her son, flees New York City for the California Redwoods. That too put grief in my head this weekend, as I stared at my own little forest in Massachusetts.
This weekend I had a hot stone massage on my birthday. The music playing under was a piano piece that was sometimes lively and tripping, sometimes desperate, sometimes quiet and ponderous, like water slipping easily over stones (I've always associated piano pieces with the movement of water). This music felt like grief to me, but not the dirgeful trudge of it, the weighted drowning over it. More the ways our minds and bodies try to cope with its heaviness. Movement, distraction, and the chosen moments when we look it in the face before turning away again.
And I thought that it's been five years of grief, March after March after March after March after March of it, slipping through and slipping by and trying to choose our moments of looking it in the face before we turn away again.
March is a good month for it.
This weekend I talked to a tarot reader about my burnout. I talked to an acupuncturist about my anxiety. I talked to a yellow wood about the best way to use my voice.
Most of my online "activism" takes place on one of the few platforms I'm still on (Facebook), and--I don't think it's helping. Maybe it is, maybe there are people quietly reading but not replying, quieting reading and taking strength in knowing they're not alone. Maybe there are people who know I'm not a monster and therefore if I've been advocating so staunchly on what is clearly an unpopular side for Left-leaners, there might be something worth interrogating. I don't know.
But it doesn't feel like I'm helping most of the time. I haven't seen additional people take up the call as a result of anything I post. The primary engagement I get lately is from gentile men who think they understand antisemitism better than I, a Jewish woman, or who think they understand the Middle East better than I, a woman who's had family in Israel since before I was born and who has been paying attention since I was five and saw a picture of my cousin napping in the bomb shelter, his face obscured by a gas mask. It's exhausting every time one of these men sea lions in, not even to engage with me, but to engage with a straw version of me, imputing thoughts I don't have to me, words I haven't said to me. These people who haven't engaged with me in a meaningful way in a decade, either in person or online, but I'm one of the few people posting about this, so they're going to spend their anger on me.
This weekend I turned forty. Life is short, and getting shorter with every passing year. I have one life to live, and I'm standing here in this yellow wood deciding how I want to live it. I'm probably going to be posting less, we'll see. But I'm no longer going to engage with these angry men who don't actually want to have a conversation with me. They don't get to poison my days anymore. Life is short, and they're not entitled to another second of mine.
If you do want to have a conversation with me, if you have questions, I am here for that. I am here for you. It's never too late to say that there are things we've misunderstood, that we've been taken in by one of the world's most powerful propaganda machines, activating a centuries-old latent bias. It's not too late. I have always believed in our ability to change. I've seen it firsthand. But if you want that conversation with me, you have to start it, and you have to start it in good faith, with an interest in listening, with questions. Not with attacks, not with assumptions.
But please know that this is a big energy drain to me each time it happens. This isn't an academic exercise or a hunt for a dopamine hit. This is my family, my life, my blood. This is real and deeply personal to me.
This weekend I sat quietly with myself. This weekend I stood long in a yellow wood.
I hope it's made a difference.
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Moon rise in Lenox, Massachusetts. Photo by Zelda Knapp. |