What I Hear When I Stop Talking

One hot and humid Friday afternoon, I took my computer and my lukewarm iced coffee and relocated myself away from the kitchen table laden with crumbs and a lanky, brooding teenager to the front porch.  Here I sat, surrounded by beauty and a different kind of unfinished chores, and looked through lists and calendars, things to schedule, places to be and my head started to feel like a slime container I once found that had been left in a hot car for several days.

I closed the portals to the world of deadlines and action.  There was no imperative in this moment to force myself through them and I finally realized that with such clarity.  The ending of a poem by Morgan Harper Nichols played through my mind:

“Let July be July.

Let August be August.

And let yourself

Just be even 

In the uncertainty.

You don’t have to fix

Everything.

You don’t have to solve

Everything.

And you can still

Find peace

And grow 

In the wild 

Of changing things.”

I closed my computer and stared at the beautiful tree in my front yard.  She was so small, just like my children when we moved into this house over a decade ago.  Now she is a giant, towering above our two story house, branches reaching wildly in every direction.  I want to correlate my teenagers’ growth with her own becoming, make a metaphor of it as I love to do, but they aren’t quite her yet.  They are taller, but still spindly, awkward, searching, getting lost on a weekly basis.  They don’t house nests and birds in every nook and cranny or provide gigantic sweeping shelter for the smaller trees beside them steadily, like she does.

It’s easy to worry about them coming of age in this world, in this time of hyper-connectivity but not the most life-giving kind, of environmental destruction and collapse, of highly available ways of numbing and turning off, but few invitations or holding spaces for the work of actual becoming.  Sometimes I don’t know how to be here.  I don’t know how to hold the weight of what teenagers seem to be carrying in a way that helps any of us.

The boy from the kitchen table comes out and sits in the chair beside me.  I don’t say anything because I’ve learned that sometimes that’s the quickest way to close the door, before it even opens.  We are sharing a space, a morphic field, but there are no words.  A Red-Tailed Hawk that has been circling overhead starts to scream.  I know that sound well, as I’ve been apprenticing to it.  It’s gutteral, deep, knowing, and also somehow accepting.  I sort of doubt she is up there wondering to herself if every summer after this will be hotter than the last, if there are things she could say or do that she just doesn’t know that would help her fledglings find their wings, if her work matters, and whether or not it is right to water her lawn.

“Do you hear the hawk?”  I ask him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” he answers, looking up.

Leave it at that for now, I tell myself, leave it at that.