Because We Grieve The Tearing of New Beginnings...

So, I have this theory about trees, and it goes something like this: Once upon a many many times ago, trees were people, maybe human or not, but alive things nonetheless, much as they are now, except at the time, they were full of motion and command, brazen and majestic. Maybe trees were giants, and why not so? It sounds crazy but stay with me.

Trees—former beings from ancient times: One minute they are living, the next, they are running, wrestling: that familiar striving of being until they become trapped and immobile, much like the game of command and freeze.  When I think about trees like this, I think about the Judaic anecdote of Sodom and Gomorrah: the clouds spread apart. The sky coughing out balls of fire. And then, Lot’s wife, one minute as Lot’s wife and the next, pillar of salt.  

I am drawn to the idea of a new world descending, both in its literal and its literary depictions—heaven and earth passing away as mildly as the pull of sweet sleep, or with force like the torrential rains in the time of Noah. Giants becoming trees, lot’s wife a pillar of salt. This is, however, not a Biblical exegesis. Yet, I admit that I return readily to scripture with its allusions of history and metaphor and legend—as a primary site for truth searching in the sense that truth can be both complete but also in construction.  Hence my insistence on the literal and the literary analytic. But I digress. Where were we? Yes, trees.

It's hard to believe that there are people who do not find the sight of trees arresting, who do not stop suddenly, drawn by its meandering pose—commanding and at once, restless; people who are not struck by the oddity of its unmoving presence, all the while having its thick branches acquiesce to the demand of gravity: bending, and spooling and twisted, like a conductor with hands in the air, directing the performance of an orchestra. Trees are so strong on the outside, yet they fruit the juiciest mangoes and avocados and berries, the hard and haunted landscape yielding soft and sweet things. But I am merely stating the obvious. Maybe I am just so compelled because trees remind me of contradictions—might and immobility, stagnancy, and productivity, the present but also, the past. They remind me what it means to be both things at once, to live in this in-between, in the non-thing, to stay in it, to be stuck in it.

Some time ago, I decided to go off social media. By decided, I mean a sudden, seizing knowing in my heart that I had to stop. That it was time to stop. No explanations. Just silence. This is not a demand I would ever naturally have made of myself—yet here I am in the in-between of what is old and what is new: when motion becomes interrupted, when movement is grounded in place. Not quite a tree and not quite a pillar of salt—but something of what I was not and something of what I have not quite become. Some of my bigger considerations in the first few weeks were these: what would become of the world that I leave? What are the ways in which the gap of my presence would swallow itself, close in, replace the void? Before and after my erasure from time and place? What, exactly, am I giving up and what am I willing to lose? In more practical terms, I thought: what if my account gets deleted and I lose everything? Worse, what if I am losing an opportunity to inscribe myself in the lives and hearts and minds of the world. As a writer, the concept of influence can be slippery and mis-informed, and I wondered: what if I am risking the canvas upon which I perform my art? After all, absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes, absence is the prompt towards forgetfulness.

And now, I think: so, what?

I can afford this line of thought because I am lucky enough to have a lens that compels me towards light in the midst of seeming darkness. Not that social media is darkness, but that metaphors are useful for seeking meaning, and that what we know of a thing is not all that can be known of it. So darkness in this context is my way of languaging what I fear. And this speaks to change, and loss, and silence. Everything is infinitely under construction. Yielding to something. Else. It is a miracle to be this theatre upon which the drama of life unfolds—hopefully for good, and even if not, still under construction. So that now, I wonder: What if the goal is to be forgotten, to be erased so that one might emerge as a new thing? Why is the idea of loss so often attended with grief and fear? Has loss, not sometimes, shown itself to be a different kind of finding? A different way of being?

I admit that I am not that much stuck up on social media as I am on the stories that I have told myself of who I am, and the structures from which I draw strength and meaning in the world. As humans, it is practical to grasp towards the familiar. We want to keep our friends and support systems and social circles, and yet we forget that we have no power over what we keep or lose, that the idea of influence comes from a place much deeper than motion and activities. That there is nothing to prove and nothing to perform, that the things which have been given will be kept, (yes) and that if we strive, we do not strive in this time and space.

The other truth is this: our worlds are invariably always changing—within or without, and when the time comes to press into a state of alterity, not everything can travel with you. It is sad and it is true, and it is good to lean into the hunger, because hunger is fruitful in the sense that it teaches us how to be full. Loss as a way of finding. Change as a way of becoming.

This is what I know: what you lose in the face of transitions was perhaps never really yours to keep. I say this as personal conviction not as a rule. It is good to grieve the tearing of new beginnings, but it is better to yield into the nudging of your own life whistling to you from all your tomorrows: This is what I am ultimately learning: be willing to go, in the manner of all clichés, down the “uncharted” path. Be willing to hunger. And by doing so, maybe we will find that it is true that there is an economy of life much better than what we have known. But how can we tell except we are willing, and except we go?