How To Fall

Oh.

Hello there.

Hi.

Are you okay?

Not so much, maybe?

Something to do with this horrific new (old) war that, however geographically remote, feels like it’s alive in your very own cells? Or the simmering pots of hatred continuing to have their lids yanked off — deep suspicion, if not outright loathing, still being cooked up on the stove of ignorance, weaponized lately among once-imagined allies, if not actual friends? Are you mayhaps a wee bit concerned about the drumbeat of recursive insanity here at home? If you’ve turned the anxiety of your Tums-coated stomach lining away from our usual nightmare, perhaps you’ve discovered a bit o’ consternation regarding that Clark Kent-costumed Christocrat’s sudden ascension to a Congressional throne. You know, the End Times embracer you’d never heard of until he became twice removed from dominion over the free world. A fella who made clear his allegiance lies not with the US Constitution but with the same people who took a literal shit on our Capitol almost three Januarys ago.

Or maaaaybe you feel a little non-compos-mentis about the real and pressing notion that in eleven months, another inexplicably close election for the American Presidency will, in all likelihood, find a sociopathic congenital liar, convicted fraudster, quadruple federally indicted criminal racist sex assaulter facing 91 felony counts who cheated off Hitler’s term paper last month and oopsie daisy already tried to overthrow the same government he wants to be in charge of again and for which he received impeachment number two (electric boogaloo) facing Joe Biden, who, just so that we’re very clear, has been an imperfect but overall EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE AND VERY PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENT, arguably achieving more during his first term than any other chief executive in the last seventy years.

What I am saying is this: If you, Beloved Reader, separate and apart from any personal difficulties, are struggling to keep it together right now, I believe that is both reasonable and appropriate given our collective circumstances! And if you aren’t, I would ask you to share your secret with the rest of us. I would also ask you, gently and not without affection, to consider the possibility that you’re what the kids have renamed…delulu.

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Once, I posted a very close-up picture of a flower and tweeted:

For so long, it has all been so heavy and so dark. I am trying to zero in on the relentlessness of miracles.

It was April. I had just turned an age I didn’t want to turn. I’m not sure I understood it at the time, but I was grieving. Things I’d hoped for that hadn’t come to pass—people and creatures I loved who were gone. Perceived failures of work and creativity and society’s unmet expectations. All of that, but there was also the black hole of nihilism that seemed to be sucking most of the light from the outside world and much of America, very specifically, despite Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, despite Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and the brief burst of hope their elections ushered in.

Thinking of you in the heaviness and the dark and the flowers. xoxoxoxo

A DM in response to my tweet from someone I knew only as an admirer of her virtuoso writing about politics, culture, and technology and through a few public exchanges on that website — this was back when Twitter still belonged to the guy who fasted 22 hours a day, grew a Merlin beard during quarantine, and posted in semi-koans about the light of consciousness.

Messages sent back and forth between us that followed were like flares flown up from the cyber depths, and out of them emerged true friendship. When I texted her a few weeks back to say that I was thinking about our eventual real-life meeting, an afternoon spent walking along the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park in the still-warm early October sunlight of an almost indescribably beautiful Fall day the year before, mourning the Twitter we loved at the hands of the red-pilled rocket doofus who’d just bought it, she responded with photographs of her father.

Handsome, glinty-eyed, stoic seeming — elegant yet mischievous in a way I recognize as specific to a generation of men too quickly vanishing.

She said his last cancer treatment had failed.

I could feel grief vibrating through the bobbing ellipses as she typed, even though he was still right there, very much alive and in the same room as she wrote. My friend knew I’d been the fortunate daughter of a Dad who I couldn’t have imagined living without but had for the last thirteen-plus years anyway because what choice did I have?

Please tell me literally any pointers, including how to sit in a chair. I just love him so much.

It stopped me short, that invocation. Because the truth is every time I’ve done it, there was no other option but to let my knees bend where I’d been forced to stand. I’m pretty sure that’s the only way. Sit down when you have to. Because otherwise you’d fall. We sit, and we stay, and we wait through what we have to wait through, witnessing what we have to witness no matter how heavy or cleaving our hearts, no matter how tectonic the ground shifts beneath us because really though: what choice do we have?

Another old friend of mine lost her mom last Spring. She DM’d me on Instagram recently, wanting to know when the grief would subside. I told her that I burst into tears as a bullet of sorrow sliced through my heart just the other day. I couldn’t tell you from where that particular shot was fired. There are snipers camouflaged in the memory jungle, crouched behind different holidays and anniversaries; speeding out of time from the barrel of a random smell or the gesture of a stranger, the way a certain foppish hat in a certain color sits atop a certain type of head, a song that happens to play during the hold period on some relentless tech support call. Despite all that, I told my friend what I do believe is true: it would get softer and quieter, the shades of gone would become muted, and the waves of longing would spread out. The shots still come, but they pass through my body much more cleanly now.

Once, when I lived at the near-end of Eastern Long Island during the same season it is now, I was driving down some long twisty road, turning the wheel unconsciously, by decree of time and repetition: the ancient trees, the salt-faded shingles of houses tricked out with blinking Christmas lights, the way a slip of the moon hung itself in the vast yawn of a blackening sky. My hands turned in the right places by instinct, without thought. The trees stood as sentries, their branches like capillaries or the veins of a pale older woman’s hands, stark and sinewy against the skin, long and jagged against the night. I remember the question coming from somewhere else as a feeling more than a thought.

What about this makes you sad when what’s before you is clearly beautiful?

Iris Murdoch said, “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us,” I believe a version of this to be true for the entire natural world. Consider trees. Just try to imagine coming here as a tourist, greeted by these enormous creatures writhing from the ground. If you arrived in the summer, it would seem batshit enough, fairy tale colossuses with their wild green arms waving at you all day long.

But then this phenomenon, the one that’s been happening for the past couple of months, is still going on now - you would blink your alien eyes repeatedly, wondering what kind of dream you were in or what drug you were on. These mystical ground creatures start completely changing colors.

And then! The colors begin to float in the air until they eventually fall.

If you had a knowledgeable enough Earth Guide, they might explain it like this:

During spring and summer, leaf cells are filled with sunlight-absorbing chlorophyll, which converts carbon dioxide and water into nourishment that permits the tree to grow. When the days begin to shorten and cool, maintaining that energy system becomes too labor intensive, so the tree stops making food. Without it, chlorophyll begins to break down, and the other colors that existed before but were suffused by the green’s dominance start to become visible. While these new (old) hues emerge, a layer of cells weakens between the stem and the branch, and as it does, the leaf’s water connection slowly severs. The dried-out leaves will fall from their own weight or the force of eventful weather. Within hours of this, substances are released designed to heal the scars left in the wake of what’s gone¹. Protection from Invasion. Infection. Parasites.

Harm.

Part of the tree was always designed for its own inevitable loss.

The whole process typically occurs leaf by leaf. With a Ginko — the kids might call this species extra — the scars form simultaneously.

Following a particularly cold blast of air, together, at once.

Overnight.

While you were probably dreaming

all of them will fall.

Then, the blankness. The barbed outlines. The jagged wood stitched into the clear, dry air. I don’t know why this is the design. I only know from the atlas of my own life that growth is often borne from dormancy. There is more of the sky to see now. Something is working itself out. And you are prepared for it, somehow.

Stasis. Grief. Sorrow. Emptiness…the wintering of who we are.

How do we rest in this liminal space, what’s known in tree-speak as the abscission zone? Holding these long nights, full of boundless grief for so much unspeakable loss. I try to imagine myself on a detour in a country I didn’t choose, an accidental tourist without a map. Survival requires curiosity and patience. Remaining open and clear. Assuming goodness while prepared for less. Seeking information while keeping my own counsel. Trying to pick out patterns in the native tongue. Staying hopeful. Looking for light. The relentlessness of miracles. Flares sent up from strangers in the dark. Dreaming of new roads, all the ways I never imagined might exist to return home.

Even if I could plot someone else’s course through grief, a map is not the same thing as the territory.

I breathe in and out. My heart beats. I digest food. Blood runs through my veins. My Dad’s… dadness...meanders through my brain. I control none of it, but I’m grateful for the mechanisms that keep me tethered to the mystery of everything I can’t see or possibly explain.

You know how to sit. How to bow your knees. You know about love. And you know how to breathe.

The wheel turns where the road bends, even in the dark.

Leaf by leaf. Or all at once.

You know how to fall.

So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

1. For more on the genius of trees and the titular season about to begin, see Katherine May’s Wintering.