It’s raining as I’m typing this, heavy rain pattering against the windows, making a soothing sound I sometimes long to be inside to hear on sunnier days—a rhythmic falling of water like I’d put on as a Youtube video to focus. It’s better, of course, when it’s just happening, when the skies are grey and dark and I’m granted permission by the universe to stay in bed longer, to curl up with a book or a journal, savoring a hot drink. (For me, today, a fall-heralding sugar bomb of a pumpkin spice latte from BOLD coffee bar, which they make with real pumpkin.)
It’s the autumn equinox this weekend, an in-between time—a time when the day and the night are equal lengths. The changing of the seasons always brings about reflection and perspective, but particularly so this time for me. I’m looking at everything critically, evaluating past decisions and assumptions, and present courses of action, like nothing is solid and everything is up for debate.
It feels good and exciting and revelatory to be in that transitory space, but it also feels unstable—and, instability, though it can be life-giving in the necessary shifts chaos allows for, can also be really uncomfortable.
In these times of heightened reflection—periods of taking stock of life—it’s a funny feeling when I look back at certain circumstances and feel disbelief for the ways I couldn’t see things clearly then, that I feel snap into sharper focus in hindsight. Sometimes this happens in an instant, when I’m describing something simple that I once firmly believed about a situation, or about myself, to someone I trust, and realizing, at the same time that I’m speaking it, that I’m wrong.
The thing is—that’s also a gift. In sharing and unpacking things with people who listen, I am granted the space to grow. And that’s grace.
It’s also funny to me because I feel that it will be that way for the rest of my life: the self a few years ahead of me looking back at the self a few years back. Feeling pity, sympathy or annoyance for all that she doesn’t know, but will. While knowing at the same time that everything I know right now is limited, too, and that later I’ll have answers to the questions I’m asking now—but that later me will have new questions.
Feeling sort of like a softening and fraying velveteen rabbit. A little worse for wear, but better for that, too.
I am asking a lot of questions of my life, and it seems like many friends and loved ones around me are doing the same—whether because they want to or because they’re being forced to by an upheaval of circumstances. Like, for many, the ground is shifting, and there’s not a lot of certainty about where we’re landing yet.
I think that’s kind of what it’s all about, for me anyway—accepting that sometimes I have to spend some time living with my questions and uncertainty—but realizing that when I’m feeling that way, other people are probably feeling that way, too.
This helps when I write, and also when I just pay attention. Because when I write, and when I pay attention, I realize that I’m not really alone in any of this.
I realize that the books and art and media and music and TV shows that strike a chord with me also resonate with other people, because we are not going through any of these things alone. As humans, we are inherently part of a greater community and a greater collective—parts of a whole—whether we choose to engage with that or not. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. ”
For me, knowing and treasuring that wholeness, that not-aloneness, trying to reach out more than I keep quiet, and share those burdens and questions, rather than living in private uncertainties, is a practice.
I didn’t send a newsletter out for August and I felt badly about it, because this too was a practice I wanted to hold myself to, at least for a while. But I’m trying to live with the imperfections. So, here’s a short one I wrote quickly. And, since it was just Leonard Cohen’s birthday, closing with an old favorite from his song “Anthem”:
“Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
Thanks for reading!
Gina
Other writing I’ve published recently:
Claire McMillan explores the friendship, rituals, and collaborative artistic process of two female Surrealist masters for The Boston Globe
Witches and love spells abound in NH author’s cozy, queer rom-com for The Boston Globe