What does it mean to be a thorn?
I’m currently driving to Vermont with my parents and my pathologies inherited from them are on full internal and external display.
My father knows I’m on the clock, working, but not five seconds after he said, “I won’t talk” he asked me two questions — Was I warm enough? When I’m driving, do I trust Waze? — and I quietly practiced my patience.
My mother is hiss-whispering at him.
I am taking deep breaths, but not so deep that I push my mother to the edge where she full-volume yells at me.
I guess this is a scene most of us can relate to.
If I’ve learned anything from the last year of my life it’s that I’m pretty good at controlling my experiences most of the time, though. Removing myself entirely from discomfort.
In Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul he uses the metaphor of a thorn in the side of your arm as the origin story of this kind of behavior and life.
The alternative to pulling a thorn out right when it gets pushed in is to leave it in and do everything you can to protect it from hurting you more. Don’t bump it, don’t put yourself in settings where it might get bumped. Protect, protect, protect.
Eventually, meet someone you want to let in, let close, and realize you can’t be with them the way you want to be with the thorn in there. It’ll get pushed all the time with someone right there with you.
So you build a box to go around it.
And you feel proud of that box you’ve made … even though it prevents you from sleeping on your side, prevents you from full-body contact with others, keeps you from ever relaxing fully.
Your whole life can become about that box. Protecting that thorn.
The obvious easier chose is to pull the thorn right out when it goes in.
But that’s something most of us don’t do. We revisit our pains, we ruminate; we get sad, angry, mad in loops. We keep the thorn in and we build a box around it and we think “There! Good!”
I’m not so much working on pulling out the thorns as they go in as I am working on taking off box after box after box after box that I’ve built over them. I haven’t gotten to pulling most of the thorns out yet. And without my boxes I’m in a whole lot of pain near constantly.
(That’s the best way I can explain this year. Constant thorn pain. I’m trying to face the pain with grace and patience and self love and I’m falling short near constantly.)
This year hurt more than any other year of my life. And until very recently I thought that had to do solely with what’s happened in the last 12 months — losing Monday, getting out of a relationship that was detrimental to my spirit, questioning who I am at a core level, not writing — but it’s years of pain piled on top of themselves, real heavy.
And actually, forget thorns. You can build a whole ass brick house around your self. And you can feel so wildly proud of that house that you don’t even recognize it collapsed on top of you a very long time ago. You’re just glad you’ve got your bricks and you’re covered, you’re safe. Except, of course, you’re slowly suffocating to death. People have been trying to get in to help you but they can’t.
There have been moments this year where I have felt like I was a propped up dead person. As this year comes to a close I can see that I have mostly just been slowly pulling bricks off, one by one, feeling like I’m killing myself when I’m actually saving my own life.
The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.
—Tara Brach
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How does anyone know where to live these days?
My friend Bart Schaneman sent a really great substack earlier today that hits on this, but I’ve also been having this conversation with several friends lately. A lot of folks who I know in the desert — mostly women — are wrestling with whether or not to leave or stay and I am, too, as I’ve written before.
I have the privilege of returning to Headlands Center for the Arts next month to work on my second book, which is about some of this grappling. I’ve made a good deal of peace with telling people, if they ask, that I’m not writing my book, I’m living it.
But I think it is finally time to start writing now.
I worry, of course, that people won’t want to read anything I write. Especially knowing that this book will be much more navel-gazing, substack– and tinyletter–esque writing.
Is there room in the world for that right now?
That question is in the same vein as ‘How does anyone know where to live these days?’ and I suspect that the answers to both questions are similar.
I don’t know, but I have to try [to figure it out, to do it] anyway.
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My friend Cass Marketos wrote and published a book called Compost This Book that is a beginner’s guide to composting (and the book itself is compostable!). She also writes The Rot, a really great Substack about composting and other things.
She’s brilliant.
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I am debating teaching a private class on Sunday’s.
When I was doing my MFA, I took a seminar with poet Allison Benis White about influential poets. I signed up thinking it would be one thing — reading a list of books Allison had selected — but it was a whole other thing.
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