sobbing oils the hinges

on magic, Andrea Gibson, and trusting the body’s yes

I used to think magic was some other place you had to get to. The way you’d buy a ticket for a train ride, or wait in line to glimpse the reliquary holding the blood of the saint. Infrequent, mostly elsewhere, a tug that pulls you forward if you’re lucky, but not the thing you walk around in.

More and more often, I sense magic can be anywhere you are. It’s in a body fully present, a heart that trusts its own compass, and a mind that widens to know the mysteries of the world extend beyond our capacity to name them.

Out the window as I’m writing, a catbird lifts its tail like a railroad gate, a bayberry trembles, like a tongue about to tell a secret in the mouth, and the white bellies of gulls gleam like pearl shells as the birds circle aloft.

Something deep within you knows if what you’re doing is distraction or divine.

This isn’t to shame the distraction. When the pain feels overwhelming, when the pressure of all that we see is wrong in the world and our own lives feels like it’s closing in, the body often tenses, the nervous system tightens. The gutclench, the shoulderhunch, the smallness and constriction.

We loop. We scroll. We numb.

How do we break that cycle? Anything that lets the body feel.

Drive a car and scream, bang a drum and vibrate, roll up in tight blankets and cry, press your fingerprints into the knotted muscles of the jaw and knead, and breathe. Pen to paper write the words that don’t make sense yet, shake the hips.

Get back into your body. Somewhere under the stuckness you’ll find it again, and again. Glimpse and glimmer.

Life force, life force.

A nameless lift in you wants to rise like the circling gulls, to be soaring, and crying out in awkward squawks that sound like anguish as you land, and rise again.

A nameless magnet within you wants to walk into a desert, or dive into the sea, or go out into the streets and bang pots and wail in lamentation, louder than the gulls.

Listen to it.

If art is part of what keeps you alive, make it, read it, drink it in, use both hands. If walking, dancing, holding a child or friend or beloved in your arms is what keeps you alive, go, move, reach.

Some tug in you still knows how to want things.

Some watering mouth widening lungs yes in you knows the scent trail to your wildest life.

Art that thrums knows there’s really no such thing as getting it right, getting it wrong. Even now, especially now. We need to know that, so we can keep moving, imperfect but onward.

There’s no one true path in a world this complex, but there’s the moment when the fog pulls back its collar and the throat of the sky opens up. There’s letting yourself really listen to someone, to the silence and the words. There’s some thread of aliveness we trace like a current, lose and find again, lose and find.

A life that feels worth living knows there’s every single habit you’ve slipped into, the itchy addictions and thought loops, the dead-end roads, the despair, the defeat, and every single vow you swore — to be a certain way, to have a certain name, to play a certain part, and then —

then again! thank God!

— again there’s that moment suddenly when you lift the gaze and see, aha, this world you’re in has never happened before, this sky, these clouds, and even this familiar child’s face before you obscures an underground river whose contents are an unfurling mystery.

Is the world awful or beautiful? Yes.

Is it our job to save all we can? Yes, but not from the clench of obligation so much as the spilling-over froth of a heart kept banging open so the smell of wild roses comes through. Or the smell of the morning trash, wafting from the bin.

This too. It can be joyful even as it burns.

What a blessing just to feel it while it’s here, this life.

Sobbing oils the hinges, kindness lays out the welcome mat. You can make the cup of tea and hold its warmth between your palms, or press the cool aluminum can of ginger ale against a hot cheek in the hot sun on the deck of the ferry, you can walk up to the edge of the next fear like it’s the edge of a dock and breathe deep and, when you’re not-quite-but-almost ready, hold your breath and leap.

You can sit at the desk at the job you half-loathe but can’t leave yet, thumbing a stone in the pocket that says I am a secret steadiness that continues. You can go to the protest not knowing if it will end the violence but know it helps to keep us whole. You can apologize to someone you’ve hurt not knowing if your words will be enough to heal the rift but knowing we each are a living process, reaching towards the light.

Yesterday my daughter asked me to swim with her, at high tide, down the rocky steps to the little beach below my grandparents’ cottage in Maine. The saltwater was shockingly clear and skin-prickle cold above pebbly sand studded with clam and mussel and snail shells. Wavering fronds of brown rockweed danced to slow underwater music. As I placed each bare foot tentatively one step deeper, pink goosebumps rose up my calves, then thighs, and each footprint released an effervescent puff of bubbles from the shifting sand below, as if I was walking into seltzer. The blue sky reflected on the surface and then a school of minnows flickered across my path and I began to laugh uncontrollably at the beauty of this world.

I didn’t know that hours later I’d be lying on a bed sobbing. I didn’t care in that moment that my heart has been breaking over and over again for reasons personal and political. Maybe it’s not that I didn’t care. Maybe it’s just that we can keep breaking open these hearts to the beauty of the world, and its pain, and the goodness in each other, and the stuckness, again and again, and let love fortify us for all that lies ahead.

I’ve been sobbing about so many things, and one of them is the death, last week, of the poet Andrea Gibson, whose last words were, I fucking loved my life.

I cried when I heard about Andrea’s death like a newborn deer was being dragged bloody and gangly-limbs-kicking from my guts out through my throat. I cried until the tears and snot mixed together and fell on the rug. I sobbed both for the gift of Andrea’s life and writing and the call to action in their death.

Don’t you want to die saying, “I fucking loved my life”?

Isn’t that really all there is to want?

There’s a particular way we sob in recognition of someone else’s light, particularly when it’s mirroring some unexpressed aspect of our own.

Has this happened to you? An outsized grief or wild love for a writer, artist, activist?

Who in this world cracks you open with admiration, prickles you or challenges you?

Where does your own light want to get brighter? What creation is pressing up against your own insides, nearly ready for the cusp and throttling hurt of being birthed?

We need what you have. We need your light.

And yet every time, it’s terrifying. You don’t cross thresholds in this life without facing every fear that begs to let you stay small and stuck.

Companions on the path, and safe places to go and fall apart so you can reassemble something new from your shards, are essential.

Over the past few months, I’ve begun quietly offering this thing I call a “Spark Conversation.”

One person who’s been doing them regularly recently suggested we call it “Embodied Decision-Making.”

It’s an hour of sacred space to dig into your next turning point, or find the next stepping stone on your path.

It’s part meditation, part conversation, part magic.

We drop out of the linear, egoic mind, the one that thinks it needs to be able to plan the future based on the past.

We find that thread of aliveness, that frequency of possibility, the moment when you get chills or goosebumps, when you suddenly smile like your whole body means it, and we build tools and practices to help you trust that — even if it doesn’t make sense.

Is this something you, or someone you love, could use?

I’d love to support you.

Sliding scale options, so if this would serve you, get in. I’m back from Maine next week and my calendar is open.

Read more & book a session here.