The darkest day of the year. The great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The headlines a 50/50 cocktail of terrible news and good. Friends all around me are making radical changes in their lives: leaving relationships they need to leave, quitting drinking, quitting sugar, going back to school, sitting down to write that book, at last. Friends are also suffering, greatly: too much. Too much. It is too much.
Me: I feel like a pot that is simmering and the confluence of nebulous dreams, the ones I am perpetually sketching in notebooks and in Word Docs and on Excel spreadsheets, are bubbling to the surface after a year of (very quiet) gestation. And yet they’re hazy still. Just out of reach. I can’t quite clarify the vision yet, or parse the budget. Here or here? This or that? I have faith it will come to me, that the universe will knock on the door, loudly, in time, but for now I am just walking this same back road, filling these same bird feeders, sitting on this rug next to this same wood stove, sketching the vision again and again, like the novel to which I do the same, whose plot line, despite my endless coaxing and determination, will not come clear.
My daughter said yesterday: “Mama, you just need a good plot. It’s all about the plot line.”
She is twelve and she is right. I have long resisted this notion of plot as holy grail but plot is desire, plot is story. Every human loves a good story. If you’re going to ask for two-hundred or more pages of someone’s time it’s a thing you must deliver in one way or another: that yearning, that surprise, that sting and revelation.
And so onward I go coaxing, mapping, charting, walking. A student asked me recently, “What do you do when you just can’t figure out how a story should end?” and though I had a good answer to every other question that class asked me, I didn’t know how to answer that one. “Time,” I eventually said. “Some things are only revealed with time.”
Which is a disappointing and unpleasant answer, for them and for me. And yet it’s true. And so this simmering in the dark. This waiting for revelation, and widespread vaccines, and clarity and togetherness and forward momentum.
In solidarity, my friends. And hope. And faith. That the systems will be radically re-imagined and redesigned and re-implemented. That we will find our way through this dark season of transition and gestation and grief and isolation, to find not one, but many bright paths on the other side. I can’t wait to find out what they are.
xx
Robin