The Overview Effect

The first time I saw a dead body in the wild was on the L train in lower Manhattan. It was midday, mid week, mid summer - crowded, busy, sweaty, loud. I was crammed on the 6th Avenue platform with a coworker and countless anonymous bodies. Our collective sweat created a thick humidity that hung in the air with the stench of warm pee, rotting garbage, and gasoline - New York in the summer is magical. We could be waiting 2 minutes or 20 minutes - one could never really be sure - for the hopefully air conditioned train to roll into the platform to our rescue. My coworker and I still had another 4 hours of shooting ahead of us - a mayonnaise commercial or something like it - to which we would certainly be late if the train did not show up very soon.

Finally - finally - I hear the rumbling a ways down the tunnel that announces help is on the way. I can’t sigh with relief without blowing hot air directly on a strangers neck and I can’t do a happy dance without stabbing at least half a dozen people with my pointy elbows, so I settle for silently thanking the god I only believe in when it’s convenient, and prepare to shove my way onto the already full train as it pulls to a stop in front of me. We’re about three wavy rows of people deep on the platform. With a little luck, (re. a lot of luck) we might just make it. The doors slide open and the automated voice speaks over the crowd of people elbowing their way into the crowd of people elbowing their way out of the train.

This station is - 3rd Avenue. The next station is 14th Street, Union Square.

Our sweaty competition is too slippery. I look at my coworker - his beard looks bigger, like a sponge fully saturated. His face is wet, electric red. His eyes bulge like a blown fuse. We just want to get what the mayonnaise people need so we can go home to our air conditioned boxes, our Netflix, our take out, our half smoked bowls from the night before.

Stand clear of the closing doors please.

 We’re not going to make it.

The doors try to close but bounce back open off the limbs of people trying to create more physical space through brute force. Arguing, sighing, groaning, eye rolling. Over my coworker’s shoulder, like a mirage, I see the next car over looks nearly empty.

“Over here!” I shout to him as I shove my way through the crowd. He and I throw ourselves through the door of the nearly empty car, Indiana Jones style, just as the doors finally succeed in closing and staying closed behind us. I take a deep breath - sucking in the joyous cold air and the feeling of not having 20 strangers in my immediate personal space - and freeze. The back of my throat tastes putrid, acidic, wrong. This is my third year living in New York, and by now I knew that there was never, ever, ever free space on a downtown L train during peak times without a damn good reason - a reason that is usually best avoided. Blame it on the heat, the stress, the bodies - I lost all sense of reason but was now being quickly slapped back to my senses as the train pulled out of the station and into the dark tunnel ahead.

The smell settles in my airways and soaks into my brain. The only other person in the train car with us is a large homeless man slumped unnaturally on the end of the sky blue bench across from us like a caterpillar inching slowly down a tree. I lock eyes with my coworker and see my own fear reflected back at me.

“Is he…” I whisper.

“That man is not asleep.” My coworker confirms, his voice rising to a squeak as he finishes. We stand there, silent, not daring to take another breath. I try to keep my eyes on the floor, but I can’t look away. The train rattles forward, faster, faster. The angry roar of its momentum, this big metal snake hurtling through time and space, floods my ears, squeezes my brain, threatening to pop it like a zit. Who was he? Where did he come from? Who is looking for him, worrying about him, caring for him at this very minute, while I stand here frozen in time with his body?

Earlier that week slightly later in the afternoon, I leaned against the doors of another train - a 6 I think - as it clanked and sputtered beneath Manhattan. I watched a family of tourists - mom, dad, and two preteen daughters - mapping out their sightseeing route on one of those sprawling city maps that are impossible to refold once they’ve unfurled. The train stopped and the doors slid open to welcome more passengers aboard. Among the well dressed NYU kids and the tired man with the guitar strapped to his back and the exuberant group of friends with rainbow hair was a homeless man. He stood beside the tourist family, holding onto the same pole. The family’s vacation glow evaporated as their muscles remembered their usual 9-5 tightness. I watched the dad crinkle his nose and look up from his map, incredulous that “this” was happening to him. His wife scrunched up her face, visibly holding her breath and afraid. The dad gathered his wife and daughters into his arms, and all three of them hid their faces in his shirt, breathing in something familiar. The dad didn’t take his eyes off the homeless man - who had not paid them any attention. His eyes dared the man to continue to exist. The train rolled to a stop at the next station, and the family ran out the doors the moment they opened to the world of 28th street. It wasn’t their stop. The doors closed and as the train creaked forward to hurtle farther uptown, I caught a glimpse of the family laughing, relieved, as if they had survived something. Now they had a story to take home to Wisconsin or Iowa or Alabama, about how dangerous New York was, how they saw the real New York on their family vacation, and how they survived it. Some of that world famous New York grit has rubbed off on them and made them the toughest, strongest, coolest, most interesting upper middle class white family in all of South Dakota.

I imagine that family standing at the other end of this L train with my coworker, this body that was once human, and I. I can see their sneers, their horror masking their not so secret joy of having a “cool” story to tell their friends back home, their belief that they are untouchable. As if they never smell, as if they are safe from hardship, as if their bodies won’t one day rot on a train, in their bed, in the ground.

I worry about this man even though it’s far too late for worry. I hold my breath all the way to Union Square as if not breathing in the scent of death will save my body from rotting, just like all the others will.

———

Being physical has so much to give - the feeling of grass between your toes, ocean spray on your face, fingers in your hair, the smell of an old forest swirling up through your nostrils and bathing your brain in a pine scented bath. The way your heart races after you cartwheel in a big empty field, the moment of pure flight between jumping off the rocky ledge and landing in the crisp river below, digging with your hands in the dirt to plant something living, carrying the Earth under your fingernails for the rest of the day. Physicality offers us the opportunity to get lost. For all its beauty, being physical can be more of a curse than a gift. We are limited in the space we have to stretch and grow- we all have finite real estate. If we’re lucky, we’re doomed to watch our bodies decompose slowly over many years. We can’t enjoy the choir of tree branches singing in the wind without knowing that like the trees, we too will grow old and fall to make way for the new when our time is called. We can’t feel the damp sponge-y tops of mushrooms in the forest with our delicate, curious fingers without decomposing like they do. We can’t play like children in the soft, dewy dirt without eventually being called back to it.

———

Thursday, January 29th 1998

I’m grateful for awakening in the morning and feeling okay. I’m grateful for Al not having too many pains today.

———

Dad calls to tell me that Grandma has passed. I’m on the Queensboro Plaza subway platform waiting for the train to take me home to Brooklyn after a long day on the set of the cheesy time travel sci-fi feature that I’m interning on for the summer. I don’t know what to say besides a quiet “oh” and a choked “I’m so sorry. Thank you for calling.” I hang up when the train screeches to a stop in front of me, screaming for my attention. I file in with all the others heading to homes or happy hours after another long sweaty day. My knees are weak but there are no open seats. As the train sputters out of the station with arthritic groans, I stare out the window at the passing cityscape while immense guilt races through me.

I only knew my Grandma Toby after the death of Grandpa Al. I knew her as depressed. I have a few notebooks of hers I found in my aunt’s house, and when I found them I scoured them in the hopes of getting a glimpse of who she was before everything changed when I was 6. All the notebooks are half full, and dated with the years my grandfather was sick and then after he was gone. They shed a brighter light on the depth of her pain, but they tell me nothing of who she was without it. She loves to read. She’s very funny. She’s a great storyteller, a great listener, very smart. One time she dressed up as Groucho Marx for Halloween. My dad and aunts paint me this picture when I ask, but the sheet of glass that protects the picture in its frame is too thick for me to do anything but observe as if staring at a painting I’ve been told is a masterpiece in a crowded museum.

My train plunges underground and rolls into Manhattan. When it stops at Union Square, I run up the stairs into the oppressive New York summer sun instead of transfering to the L to go home. The square is filled with the honks and groans of late afternoon traffic, a speaker loudly crackling hip hop for buskers and their applauding audience, a small dog barking at a big dog, the chatter of friends and dates and acquaintances moving through time. I try to separate the smell of hot garbage from the scent of the trees towering over me as I inhale deeply, searching for peace by convincing myself that everything is fine, fine, fine. I expected this to happen, she had been sick. All your life you knew you’d regret not knowing her better when this time came, you were prepared for this. It’s fine, you just need to relax. I burst into tears. I keep walking around the park, crying and avoiding eye contact. Times like when your grandmother dies are the best times to live in New York. This city has seen it all; crying in public is not a spectacle here. “You have the right to cry in public without being acknowledged” is written into the city’s constitution just above “The Right to Free Speech” and below “The Right to Have Explosive Opinions About Pizza.”

Not knowing the rules, a guy about my age stops me and asks if I’m alright. I had forgotten I could be seen, and reminding me of my visibility in that moment felt cruel. I choke out something along the lines of “I just found out my grandma died. I’m fine” between sobs. He asks me if I want a hug and I hesitate, but ultimately nod yes. I’m grateful for the kindness of strangers, for the outpouring of love one can find in the world when you’re open to it. He asks me for my name, if I live around here, can he have my number? And suddenly, holding space for my pain is simply an act to create an opening to touch my most tender pieces.

———

I’m covered in sand. I sit in Costa Rica where the Pacific Ocean threatens to lick my toes and I look up at the stars stretching from Playa Flamingo to Playa Potrero and beyond. A boy sits next to me - our arms almost touch, but not quite. We take periodic breaks from straining our necks up towards the heavens to take a bite of our take-out cheesecake with plastic forks. It’s not very good, not like the cheesecake back home; this cheesecake is foamy, mild, only slightly sweet on my tongue- part of the memory nevertheless.

“If you could go to space, would you do it?” he asks me. He doesn’t turn to look at me, instead staying fixated on the stars. I don’t turn to look at him either though, so I guess I don’t know that for sure.

“Absolutely. Would you?”

“Of course. There’s so much to explore.”

The crisp evening air tastes the day’s sweat that has dried on my skin like its licking an ice cream cone. Waves crash - again. Again. Again. The beach is never quiet.

“Which planet would you go to?” I ask, wondering what my answer is.

“Any of the moons would be really cool. Triton, Charon, Miranda maybe. It would be crazy to see the rings of Saturn up close.”

I try to imagine the psychological effect of seeing the Earth from space - the Overview Effect, I think they call it. It reminds me of a study I read about in a book. In the 60s or 70s, a neuroscientist in Eastern Europe somewhere transplanted the brain of one monkey into the body of another monkey. The monkey was able to track moving objects with its eyes, chew, and swallow. It stayed alive and conscious for six hours. This is what I imagine seeing the Earth from space to be like - disorienting, beyond what our monkey brains were built for, beyond the realm of normal human experience, impossible to understand. I tell the boy about the monkeys.

A whispered “whoa” escapes his lips, nearly drowning in the wave that bursts and settles around the tips of my toes, and withdrawals.

I met the boy on Tinder, and I don’t want to tell my friends back home about him. I didn’t know until halfway through our sunset hike when I said “all organized religions are cults” that he is a fiscally conservative, born and raised Methodist frat boy from Texas. He probably didn’t know until around the same moment that he was flirting with a queer, spiritual, anarcho-socialist vegan who calls Brooklyn and New Jersey home. Regardless of the ways our existences inherently insult the other, our sunset hike turned into dinner which turned into dessert and star gazing. We are Romeo and Juliet, 2021 edition.

“Actually, maybe I wouldn’t go. To space, I mean. There’s so much to explore here too.” I say as I look at the lights sprinkled along the distant coastline. If a life is lived in the distance and I’m not around to see it, is it really happening? “I think I’ll get to explore the universe one day, after I’m dead, but I think you need to have a physical body to explore the physicality of Earth. I think this opportunity is special. I don’t want to spend my chance to see the Earth trying to escape it.”

“I get that. I feel the same way actually,” he says, a statement that surprises us both each time it is shared. I’ve been holding this plastic fork for too long, twirling it in between my fingers, poking lightly at the sandy flesh of my thigh. I try to put it in my pocket - it doesn’t quite fit. I don’t want to be the weird girl with a plastic fork poking out of her pocket on a first date. I didn’t bring a purse. I put the fork down in the box with the remainder of the cheesecake. Does he want more? Is that in the way?

“When you’re 80, would you take a pill to make you 20 again? 20 physically I mean, but you’d still mentally be 80.” He asks me. I like his questions - far more interesting than I expected from a frat boy. A bias to confront.

“No, absolutely not.” I answer immediately, without thinking. Is that true? “I want the whole experience, the human experience. I want to know what it’s like to decompose slowly over time, even if it sucks.” I wish I knew how to recognize more constellations. The brilliant mess of stars strewn across the inky sky are as indecipherable as they are mesmerizing.

“But ask me again when I’m 80” I add.

He chuckles. I ask if he would do it. “Absolutely.” He answers immediately, without thinking. Our fingertips find each other in the sand, grazing the forbidden fruit we didn’t expect to want so much.

“This cheesecake isn’t as good as it looks, is it?” He says, and looks at me. His smile is dimpled, playful, conspiratorial; like we are the only ones in on the joke.

“No, it really isn’t.” And yet, it’s perfect. 

———

2000, date unknown

I never dreamed we would part. Even the months you were sick. I kept feeling it was a bad dream. Of course you would get better. Of course you would never leave me. I’m suddenly angry now. Angry that any of it happened. You tried so hard to get better. Nights before we went to sleep, we always touched each other’s hand. Lots of times we even said the words, “we’ll fight it.” We’d awake in the morning, slide over to the other right away. We’d hold on for dear life - so glad we were still curled up together.

 Grandpa Al died when I was 6 in July of 2000. At my Aunt Francine’s home in North Carolina there were big, intricate carved stepping stones shaped like fish with colorful glass eyeballs in the backyard. The stone fish lived a calm life in the flowing shade of towering red maples, yellow birches and flowering dogwoods. Every autumn they’d sit content in the rushing stream of colorful leaves. Grandpa and I would search the woods for big sticks and go fishing for leaves off the back porch. The golden red river was peaceful. Sometimes he’d ask me questions and I’d babble. Other times we allowed the imaginary rush of the river to do the talking.

Other than a few photographs of him holding me and my baby sister that my brain warped and saved as memories, leaf fishing is the only memory I have of him until my memory of the day he died. His death was my first experience with death of any kind, but I primarily remember it as the first of two occasions that I saw my dad cry. I crawled behind the white couch in the living room that I had dripped chocolate ice cream on the week before and cried when I heard the news- mostly because I knew you were supposed to cry when someone died. I was sad because I knew the event was sad, but I didn’t really understand yet what it meant for someone to die. When I came out from behind the couch I saw my dad sitting alone outside on the steps of the back porch looking out at the weeping willow we had planted together a few years before - another implanted memory from photographs of me in dirty denim standing tiny between him and the towering shovel in my pudgy hand. I don’t remember seeing his face as he sat out overlooking the yard, but I watched him through the sliding glass door and knew he was crying. Sometime that same week we drove down to North Carolina for the funeral. I was annoyed that I wasn’t allowed to see the body. I was a big girl after all, I had already seen and loved Jurassic Park - I wasn’t easily scared, and I was curious. What did a dead body look like? Was that really my grandpa in that box? No matter how much I whined, they didn’t let me see the body, and they didn’t let me see them cry.

 ———

Some days I feel trapped in my body - like my body is a cage with bars too small for me to stretch my arms and legs through to grasp for space. Like my essence was ground up into powder and poured into a cellulose capsule, no different than the citrus fruits and rose hips pulverized into an easy to swallow dose of vitamin C. My abdomen hurts all the time because I have too many organs stacked on top of each other and shoved into this human torso that had to be zipped back up quickly to keep its contents from bursting back out like those in an overstuffed suitcase. My ribs are too small for my lungs to fully expand, and if I could shatter them into a million pieces with one big, deep, powerful breath, I would.

———

It’s a brisk fall evening in Manhattan. I hurry down Bowery Street through the throngs of other newly released 9-6ers to meet a friend for a beer and an inevitably embarrassing game of pool at our favorite dive bar in the East Village. I keep my arms hugged tight to my body and my chin close to my chest to help keep in the little bit of warmth my cracked leather jacket holds for me. One of the thousands of people streaming around me catches my eye. We have already passed each other but we both do a triple take before finally stopping, neither of us terribly sure why. It takes a moment for my eyes to send the information to my brain and tell me why I noticed him. Josh from the high school party. We stood and stared at each other while the rest of New York flooded around us as if we were a dam designing their flow.

I’m 16 again. My hair is long and streaked with blue. I’m wearing low rise skinny jeans, a lacy tank top, and a pleather jacket from Forever 21. I’m outside at a house party, trying hard to make friends so it won’t be the last one I’m invited to. It’s October, and I’m shivering. Most of the other kids are ignoring me, but Josh from chemistry notices my discomfort.

“Here, take my sweatshirt.” He pulls the gray hoodie over his head and hands it to me. The hoodie is huge and swallows me whole like plankton sucked into the hungry mouth of a whale shark. I’m grateful for the extra layer but more grateful that someone is talking to me. The night moves quickly. Soon the party moves inside and Pineapple Express is playing on the basement TV. Exhausted, I curl up on the couch and try to shut out the noise. Josh is there, grabbing me eagerly with two, four, six, eight hands that spring into being the more I try to wriggle away. Not right now. I’m tired. Please stop. Just let me sleep. I’m too afraid of not being liked to say no louder. A stubby hand reaches its way into my jeans. I hope anyone in the room will come to my rescue, but they don’t, and neither do I.

“Do you remember what you did to me?” My brain tells my mouth to say. “Hey,” my mouth says.

“How’ve you been?” “Good. Just leaving work. You?”

“Yeah pretty good, I just moved here from Jersey City.” “Nice. Well, enjoy.”

“See ya.”

———

We fight so hard to hold onto bodies that never really belonged to us. The human body is amalgamations of matter. 60% of these bodies are made of water. Liquid water evaporates into vapor and comes back to the earth as precipitation. The molecules of the water we drink and excrete evaporate and become rain, clouds, oceans. Last week, these pieces we’re borrowing could have been the Nile, the Atlantic, the Dead Sea. Next week, the Pacific, Lake Michigan, the Danube.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide to make sugar. Humans and animals eat the plants, break down the sugars, and exhale carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Without carbon dioxide, the planet would be inhospitably cold. In this way, we all work together to survive.

Our bodies have ten times as many microbial cells as they do human cells. Our guts are home to an astonishing array of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and fungi, many of which have the ability to alter our moods and personalities. With so many beings wearing this body, why are we so sure we’re the ones pulling the strings? Are any of our decisions really our own, or are they guided by the village of trillions living in our digestive tract, the plants that nourish and depend on us, the oceans and rivers and lakes and thunderstorms, whispering in our ears every step of the way?

——— 

The human body is a studio apartment.

A place to rest.

A place to think.

A place to worry.

A place built for one.

The human body is one long tube, open on both ends.

Think about it.

The human body is a garden.

Delicate and resilient.

Nurturing and needy.

Growing and dying, simultaneously, always.

The human body is meat.

is pork.

is beef.

is chicken.

is something’s dinner.

The human body is a car stuck in rush hour traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Trapped.

Confined.

Small and getting smaller

And smaller.

A prison (especially when you have to pee.)

The human body is the open ocean.

Boundless

Tempestuous

Irrational

Indomitable

Free.

———

When I feel homesick, I go to a grocery store and sniff the tomatoes. Most of the time, they smell like nothing. Picked too early off of pesticide-ridden plants from a monoculture field made to grow out of season, unceremoniously thrown into a box and shipped off to strange places so far from home, most of these tomatoes have been robbed of the scent that marks them for who they are. On lucky days, I find a tomato that smells like home. Crisp, zesty, grassy and sweet, fresh tomatoes smell to me like sunshine. They smell the way a fruit salad full of berries and mint leaves tastes when eaten on a hot day with a cool breeze rustling the branches of the tree overhead.

Ten years after leaving my first home, I’m growing my first tomato plant. We have breakfast together every morning - oats and fruit for me, blazing sunlight for her. I gently rub one of her leaves between my fingers, feeling the veins that connect her ends to her roots, the hair-like tomato fuzz that releases this aroma to ward off pests and welcome those who care for her to eat her fruit. The scent of tomato plants welcomes all of me home - my fear, my self-doubt, my cruelty. My kindness, my laughter, my hopes.

There are many places I call home - New Jersey, Brooklyn, New Mexico, Costa Rica, the marble quarry, Tufna, Pleasantview, Boomtown, the Suzuki, NaturaBlue, Gullfoss Falls, the mushroom house in the woods, that pocket full of cheese, the writing in the sand, Paris. The only thing they have all had in common is that each place had a deadline from day one, even if I could not see the date yet written in stone. I eat the food, soak in the waters, dance to the music, breathe the air that tastes a little bit different in each new place, all the while feeling the earth slip out from under me, like soil eroding on deforested land. None of this is permanent.

Sometimes I think it would be easier if I were one of the lucky ones - the ones who feel like they belong in the place they are born. I used to think they were safe from the need to search that gnaws at me every night as I fall asleep, but now I think they are searching just like I am, only without the need to roam. We’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t have a place in the world’s ecosystem. We like to view ourselves as separate from the squirrels, the dung beetles, the tomato plants, the octopuses - how can we possibly be separate from all the other beings of the world, when all of us came from the same chaos and become the same dirt? We have dug ourselves up from the soil and now we’re left feeling like we don’t belong on the only planet we’ve ever called home. We can see the effects of our uprooting in every ocean, every forest, on every mountaintop. We call New Jersey, Kenya, Argentina, Thailand home, but that word means so little if we don’t belong to the soil itself that bears these names. We’ve forgotten how to have roots.

Tomato plants are meant to be planted deeply. As the plant grows, roots will emerge from the lower part of her stem, and if buried, these roots will strengthen and allow the plant to grow more vigorously. The tiny heads of roots are beginning to sprout at the base of my tomato plant. I hope they find their way deep into the soil before summer ends. The tomato plant is my home here, but soon I will move again and we’ll both have to stand on our own.

——— 

“I don’t understand,” he says, “explain it to me,” he pleads. I believe him when he says he wants to, is trying to, understand. I also know he never will. It doesn’t matter that we come from different places, different times, different histories. It doesn’t even matter that we carry different beliefs, different truths, different dreams. The problem is not with us; the problem is that language is only symbols, and we can only ever share the idea of an experience, not an experience in and of itself. We can share a symbol, understand a symbol, empathize with a symbol, relate to a symbol. That symbol isn’t an experience. If our bodies are the open ocean, our language is the life-raft we’ve built to try to reach each other in the thrashing waves.

“No, it’s nothing you’ve done,” I say. “No, there’s nothing you can do,” I say.

“No, it’s ok, I’m ok, even though I’m crying,” I say.

How lonely it is that our experience of any given moment can never be fully shared with another person. How lonely it is that we can never fully comprehend the experience of those we love. No one can know the full experience of this life, mine or yours or theirs- no one except ourselves.

I want to tell him that I’m trying to surrender to this experience of Us. I want to tell him about how hard I tried to be fully present in my body with him, this time. I want to tell him it’s not his fault that this attempt at being here now has ended in tears, that the tears and the snot rolling down my face onto my naked chest are 10 year old anger, and fear, and disgust leaving my body. You didn’t do this to me, I want to say. He did. And He did. And He did. And I did. But the words are stuck in my throat and I choke on them. I’m embarrassed. We aren’t ready for this level of breakdown. The only words I can form are I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

“What’s wrong baby?”

“What is upsetting you?”

“How can I help you?”

I’m trapped in a body that hasn’t been treated kindly. I’m trapped in a body that I have allowed to be treated badly. I am trapped in a body that I’m mad at, and is mad at me. I’m trapped in a body that I love, and that I am afraid of. I’m trapped in a body that most see as only a plaything, a prize, a present, but I know she is a cozy blanket on winter nights, a tight hug from my mother, a dirt trail leading into a quiet cloud forest, the crash of waves on the beach; she is a home, she is a life, she is everything that can be, and is. I’m crying because I’m afraid that I took too long to see this, and I’m afraid that it’s too late for her to forgive me. I’m crying because I can see how long the journey still is, but I can’t see where any of my potential paths will lead.

“I don’t know” are the only words I can say.

———

 My boss suffers from depression too. “Some days when you feel like you can’t get out of bed, you have to choose your attitude,” he likes to say. It’s an infuriating sentiment when you’re in the thick of it. It helps though - making a list of the reasons I like to be alive keeps me remembering that I like being here, until the episode ends and I can really feel it again. Most of my list consists of people.

Erica

Mom and Dad

Caitlin and John

Sasha and Emmie

Shane and Kiri and Nikki

Meli and Corrie and Risky

Tenley and Debi and Amber and Char

Alys and Jenny and Sim and Nada and Dalila and Autumn and Elliott and Nicola

My reasons to live grow more varied as the list goes on.

Salt drying on my skin after swimming in the ocean Warming up in the sun

Chewing on mint leaves

The way my legs feel both weak and strong after a long run

The big german shepherd on the beach so excited to have found a piece of driftwood Making guacamole with Dad

The way sunlight sparkles underwater

Making someone smile when they aren’t expected to

And on and on.

How is it possible to feel so grateful to be alive and so ready to die all at once?

———

I lost my apartment in Brooklyn to COVID unemployment and black mold. It was time to move on - something I had been wishing for for the whole six years I lived there that inevitably broke my heart when the time finally arrived. On my way to New Mexico at a gas station in Colorado - “Kum and Go” it has the misfortune of being named - I see feathers sticking out of the hood of my car. I pull the lever beneath my steering wheel and the hood unlatches, popping open with a dull clank. I feel around for the button under the sheet of heavy plastic and push the blue hood skyward. The little bird - mostly gray with brilliant yellow poking out beneath its rigid wings - lays on the edge of the hood looking out over the peaks and valleys of the internal machine. It rests before the inner workings of my car like a young soldier shot down just before he could breach the city’s walls.

What did she die for? For the sake of momentum, for the sake of pushing the rock up the hill again and again when we know that success just means the rock will roll back again. What do we live for? From our 10 story office buildings with expensive windows that look out onto agitated streets we are not living for the dirt under our fingernails. From our favorite spot on the couch with the latest Netflix show flickering over our faces we are not living for the all encompassing moment that carries us through the air from the grassy cliff to the rushing river water below. From the continuous state of worry about the future and regret over the past that guides us through life we are not living for the relationship between the trees and the wind that bring us song.

I don’t know what to do with the bird. I gently nudge it off the car - her feathers feel so soft - and it falls, hitting the ground with a force that feels too heavy for a creature whose bones are filled with air. It feels unceremonious to leave this little body to rest at a gas station, destined to disintegrate further and further into the pavement with each new set of tires that roll over it. Soon only a few feathers will stick up from an indistinguishable mush that melts over the tar until they become one. Pigeon pulp is a common sight on the streets of New York City. The constant traffic of the city helps the pigeon’s body give itself back swiftly to the urban earth it has chosen to occupy with us. Unlike the pigeons, this little gray and yellow bird did not choose our life. Wrong place, wrong time. She looks so out of place in this metallic burial ground but I leave her where she fell because I’m not sure if it is my right to choose the resting place of a being I never knew. Maybe she has a message for another patron of Kum and Go.

When I arrive at the Bodhi Manda Zen Meditation Center that is to be my next home, they say birds have been falling dead out of the sky all week. Some blame the recent unseasonable cold snap, while others accuse the smoke blowing across the country from the wildfires that were still swallowing up the west coast in big, greedy gulps. The headlines read:

“Birds are dropping dead in New Mexico, potentially in the ‘hundreds of thousands’”

-NBC News

“Birds ‘falling out of the sky’ in mass die-off in south-western US”

-The Guardian

“New Mexico Mystery: Why Are So Many Birds Dropping Dead?”

-NY Times

I wonder if they’re dying of heartbreak.

———

It’s late September when I arrive at the Bodhi, and most of the gardening work involves copious weeding to prepare the land for the winter crops. Like all of the foliage in New Mexico, the weeds are sharp and briery, but the dirt and the company is soft and I’m happy spending time crawling around and getting to know this piece of Earth. I find enough little bird carcasses tangled in the weeds that I quickly stop reporting them. The foxtails and sunflower stalks cut up my arms and legs and stick to my clothes - for these little birds too weak to fly, being snarled in the thick weeds must have been like tumbling into barbed wire. It’s easier to remain still, wait, surrender, than it is to fight.

One of my favorite parts of this place is that there are hot springs directly outside my bedroom door. New Mexico nights are brisk and star-studded - an experience perfectly paired with soaking in hot springs. The Bodhi’s hot springs are an excellent place to find thoughtful conversations with others who are here seeking answers about the universe and their place in it. My favorite nights though are the ones where I walk into the dark water and find myself alone in the steam that swirls into the cool night air. I stare up at the stars that I had so often wished for from my Brooklyn rooftop and practice bringing my mind back to the sweat forming on my skin, the way my limbs feel as they move slowly through the water, the slight smell of sulfur and distant smoke that reaches my nose with each breath in. Bats swoop around me to catch the bugs that are attracted to the few lights around the pool. I had shivered as I scampered down the stone steps to the hot springs in my bathrobe, but soon I’m sweating and my breath feels tight in my chest, constricted by the heat. The icy Jemez River flows south behind the hot springs, waiting for me.

The dance between hot springs and cold river and back again is a cycle that mirrors all the others we face. When I arrived they told me that you always want to finish with the cold. When you soak in the hot springs, the heat causes your cells to expand, whereas when you plunge into the river, the sudden cold causes all the cells in your body to contract. If you finish with the heat, your body is fully expanded and will contract as it adjusts again to room temperature. If you finish with the cold, you will slowly expand as you warm back up. Expand and contract, laugh and cry, live and die, and on and on. When I first arrived, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The cold was too cold. Now, guided by starlight I walk to the river, careful to avoid the rocks I have learned in the daylight. The ground is hard, dusty, sharp. It pokes at my bare feet, threatening to slice them open, until I step into the cool mud at the edge of the river.

The more you stall, the harder it is. I step into the coursing river - one foot, now two. I inhale sharply and deeply through my nose. My exhale escapes as a silent gasp as I drop myself into the flow of water, submerging myself, letting the sensation consume me. It’s not a bad sensation, it’s just a sensation. It’s not a bad sensation, it’s just a sensation. It’s not a bad sensation, it’s just a sensation. The cold slices through me like millions of tiny knives as it keeps moving - forward, forward, never still, never staying the same river from one moment to the next. Every piece of me screams - begging for mercy and begging for more. The river is agony as it tickles my skin - its flow is so gentle and so cruel. I gasp - loudly this time - as my head breaks the surface of the river and there are the stars; calm and unconcerned. I want to bolt - run as fast as I can over the thorny ground and back into the hot springs where the sulfuric waters will burn the cold from my skin and hold me tight. The warmth of the hot springs is comforting and safe; so comforting that it’s easy to miss the moment when that comfort slips off its cozy winter blanket and reveals the shackles that are really what’s holding me close. The river does not try to hold me. It does not comfort me, it does not need me, it does not love or hate me. It will not restrict me but it also will not hold me - only I can do this. I want to bolt for the hot springs but I stay, seated in the mud with the river rolling around me. No matter how badly I want to run, I will stay until the moment I feel content to stay forever.

———

 Tenley has started burying the birds in the garden beneath the reclining Buddha - who is reclined because he is about to pass away himself. She’s left her life as a stage manager behind - for what, she doesn’t know. Many afternoons I catch her sitting in the red dirt saying a silent prayer to a new tiny mound. I wonder what words she chooses, and I add a few more for my bird at the Kum and Go.

———

 Thursday, March 29th, 2001

Al - how I miss you. Today is our 58th wedding anniversary. I am so, so lonely. I wish I could get a sign from you that you are thinking of me. I so desperately need your arms around me. I need to feel that you are here with me, even if it’s just for a little while. I miss you and need you so much.

I have to believe great love is possible, because I know great pain certainly is. The pain that took my Grandmother 16 years before her body died was birthed from a great 50 year love story. Is it worth it? I suppose it depends who you ask. Is the earth between my toes and the sunshine on my face worth the periods of great emptiness - the unexplained crying fits, the darkness that comes from the deep and swallows all the light it can see? Yes, a million times yes, I always say. Whether or not I always believe it, that’s a different question for a different day.

———

At the Bodhi, it’s midafternoon and I’m sitting down by the river sobbing. My eyes compete with the river’s flow to see who can move water the fastest. I’m sitting on a tree stump at the hidden spot on the back of the property. It’ll take them longer to find me here. We’ve been in silent meditation for almost a week, and the lack of words has given way to a new depth of experiencing emotions I didn’t know were there. I don’t want to be found because these emotions don’t allow me to assign words to them, and the inevitable question, “what’s wrong?” will force me to cheapen them, to make the experience smaller so it can be shared even though it never can be, not really.

I hope the thundering river is loud enough to cover the sounds of my sobs but soon Char finds me. Her blue eyes stab like icicles right through anything I could try to hide behind. She wraps me in a long, tight hug. I try to calm down, to relax my breathing and not be seen throwing such a fit, but I’m not the one in control of me any longer and I thoroughly soak the shoulder of her moss green sweater. I prepare myself for the inevitable question. I take a deep breath. Then another. And another. I try to match my breathing to the rushing river whose singing has wiped my brain completely clean of words and logic and thought. Char pulls back and holds my shoulders gently. She looks at me, smiles and says,

“Throwing rocks helps.”

These are the first spoken words I’ve heard all week that are not Buddhist scripture, and I’m not sure that I actually heard them.

Char picks up a rock the size of her face. She howls as she hurls the rock at the ground with all her might and it splits in two as it collides with another rock. I’m afraid of the rawness of what I’m seeing, but I’ve never wanted anything more. I look down at the ground beneath my feet and pick up my own rock. It’s lumpy and heavy and enormous in my hands. I lift it with a roar and let it smash, scattering in all directions. My skin tingles. The green leaves, the red dirt, the blue sky and dark river are technicolor. The sunlight makes the whole world sparkle. My body aches from fingertip to fingertip, from head to toe. It aches with pain, with love, with longing, with satisfaction.

Together and alone, we bellow into the atmosphere as the rocks fly from our fingertips.

———

 I didn’t ask to come here, to have a life or a body or a self. Did I? Did I exist Before - a celestial being looking down on the Earth wondering what it would be like to stand on one of those little patches of green looking up into the stars and the vastness surrounding it all? It feels wrong to act ungrateful for the sensation of water, cold in my mouth, warming as it slides down my throat, flowing through my esophagus and landing in my stomach. How dare I be ungrateful for the throbbing ache of tired muscles after a long steep hike when there are stars still stuck in the sky.

Gratitude does not always come easily. Some days, I feel the hopelessness that consumed Grandma Toby seep out of every cell in my body and swaddle my bones in cement, locking me into a level of despair that threatens to turn me to stone permanently if looked square in the eye.

What we have failed to remember is that Medusa is more than a monster with the power to replace our beloved flesh with stone. The myth begins when she was raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena. Jealousy turned to wrath and Athena turned Medusa’s golden hair to snakes, making her the monster we know her as today. But what if we’ve gotten it wrong? What if Athena was protecting Medusa, not cursing her? What if becoming stone is not a death that brings nothingness, but instead a new phase of being? Are stones not as much a part of this brilliant living Earth as the trees and the oceans, the volcanoes and the insects, the mushrooms and the birds overhead?

The hot springs are not soothing without the cold of the icy river. A cold glass of water is not refreshing without the feeling of thirst. The ability to grow cannot be without the presence of dirt from which to rise. Maybe, too, we cannot have flesh without stone. When the despair is overwhelming and every breath is painful and each movement feels like it will be impossible, I ask all of the cells and stardust that make up my being to just be here, feel it, lean into the experience of getting to be stone.

Dara Israel is a diving instructor and documentary filmmaker currently based in Costa Rica. Besides hanging out with octopuses and mantas, she loves baking bagels, karaoke nights, dancing in her underwear and reading in hammocks. Stay up to date on her work by following her on Instagram @chromatophorefilms and @daradives.