secrets
I want to say substack is a garbage platform like so many others have to say, but I must confess it’s where I read some truly juicy words from truly discerning writers and thinkers. Ones not owned by mainstream media, ones offering devoted counterpoints and poetry to these times instead of sterile facts and outrage. If you ask me who they are, I will tell you.
I’m feeling inspired by said people, not to sound (or be) like them, but to keep sounding the bell in general. To keep dinging the dong. I know the world is loud and full of noise, that too many bells seem to be ringing in disorder, or perhaps in repetition—over and over. One has to learn to discern the harmony from the noise. Maybe from a distance there is a symphony we can’t make out. Maybe there isn’t an “anyone” to hear it at all, it’s just playing.
Maybe, just maybe…
I want to be known. But I’d rather be a mystery. You’ll never know my depths the way only so few people do. Even I am only recently my own intimate lover permissible to swim at uncertain depths. What I share here is hardly anything, but I’ll let you in on a few secrets of late…
If you destroy a spiders web because it is in the window sill of an open window that you now need to close, and if you leave the spider in tact, it will build a new web by morning. If your grandmother has had a koi pond in her backyard since you were a child, acting as an altar to her distant childhood in Japan, many fish will come and go over the years—some of them mysteriously. One day, when you are 38 and deeply fascinated by the last great elder in your life, you will be so lucky to go with her, in her ripe age of 93, to buy 5 new koi fish from a store on the westside. The 3 she bought last week are hiding and she thinks more friends will help them dare the surface. When you return home, and sit outside enjoying the pond with the new fish who are also hiding, you see something in the corner of the pond, long and patterned. You say aloud, There’s a snake! Your family will gather and then you will all notice a koi hanging from its mouth, stunning and white, easily 3x the size of the snakes body.
You go on and watch the fish suffer for nearly half an hour, unsure if it was your duty to spare the fish or let the snake have its meal. Who is the good guy and who is the bad guy between a creature and another creature? It’s painful watching a fish be eaten. And there is awe that a small garter snake was able to hunt a fish so large and attempt to eat it. Eating a meal this large takes a huge amount of energy for the snake, it can take hours, and indeed may not even be very enjoyable. Now you understand why all of the fish have been hiding in the 3 foot depths, especially as you see another small garter snake, and then another. This is not just a coy pond, you are now sitting by a snake feeding ground. Some of the family members will say they can’t watch, but you encourage them to, all of them being avid meat eaters, and yourself a failed vegan who’s settled on pescatarianism (for now).
You are sometimes a colonizer, as you and your family clear back the foliage surrounding the pond, destroying parts of the snake habitat. You are deeming who/what is worth saving—the fish you paid $30/each for. You spray vinegar and lay snake repellent. You put more stones in the water to create more hiding spaces for the fish and less convenient hunting opportunities for the snakes. You are god, mighty and just. Flawed, still so tenderly flawed.
When you create something, say a pond in your backyard, but also— anything, you are simultaneously creating an ecosystem. This is worth paying attention to, learning from, and taking responsibility for the best you can.
If your heart is breaking, and you are in the middle of what feels like a transition in one of your most treasured relationships, one you want to see until your death, one you never want to let go of. One you feel is impossible to let go of, one that you know is changing because inside you are changing, and you don’t know how to go about it—to let the change happen, to trust that it’s okay to happen, to surrender to the pulse of the heart instead of the logic. Just b r e a t h e. And read—read love stories. Talk graciously with friends. Look at old photos with amazement that two people could ever find love like yours in a world like this. And sob.
They say a stiff spine is an early sign of death, so you begin doing all kinds of spinal twists and rolls and waves throughout the day. You remember you are a vertebrate. You move your body like a snake while slithering your toungue. You wave your arms like the angelic fins of a koi fish. You say thank you. You whisper amen—to whom it may concern.