I’ve been attending a six-session program focused on helping participants attend to and manage the trauma of climate anxiety and sorrow. It is facilitated by Toronto psychiatrist, Nate Charach (video), who brings far more than his medical credentials to the work of creating space for our small group to move through the processing of grief. And its has sparked insights into the deep corridors of my history that have nothing to do with climate but possibly everything to do with “how I turned out.” I cannot say enough about how important this program has been for me. We are just over half the way through the six weeks we will have together.
After the third session, for homework, Nate provide us the writing prompt I’ve turned into the title of this blog. We weren’t expected to share what we wrote, just to write it. Because, you know, writing is a process. Sometimes it’s ‘the’ process.
Over generations, centuries, civilizations, we have written down our thoughts. I’m currently using the wisdom of the ancient Stoics as my morning meditation and reflection, only able to do that because it was preserved over the ages. There are famous diaries recreated for mass publication that began with an impatient drop of ink reaching toward the page from the nib of a now antique fountain pen. Or maybe a swan feather, trimmed and prepped for the purpose. Lewis Carroll swirling his fantastic tales out onto the page; Anne Frank weaving inspiration out of the most desperate of circumstances; Leonardo da Vinci using ink and paper to prove to himself whether what he dreamed was possible.
There are many who feel what they have to say long before it gets written down. My father, when beginning to write anything - a report, a speech, an invoice, his signature - as though steeling himself against commitment, circled his pen nib over the paper for a couple of seconds before setting it down on the page. Tracy J, a spoken word artist, feels her way through her body and heart as she writes, preparing to serve her audience, to pour into them the poetry that emerges. (Indeed, she pairs the art of poetry with the craft of creating exquisite teas, a perfect combination.)
Thinking about writing on paper gets me tied up in knots. Or maybe, as I write on paper, it’s thinking that’s the problem. When I write, I use a pencil. Pens are too slippery and my fountain pen is so infrequently used as to be dried up each time I remember how beautiful it feels to write with it and reach into the drawer. But handwriting takes too long for my brain. Maybe it’s ADD. Maybe it’s spectrum. Maybe it’s that I keep searching for perfection and never finding it.
Writing by hand is just slow enough that, as I do, all the things that might have sounded better are right there, in my head, sometimes even before I get to the next word. It’s like my thinking, itself, is a block. Even in 1987, at the beginning of my theological program, when you still needed to memorize and type programming prompts into computer’s “word processors,” typing was my best option. It kept up with my brain. Thank goodness I had learned to type in high school! (Indeed, although I wanted to study nuclear physics or whatever would help me solve the problem of entropy - which we all know needs solving - when I arrived at Mount Allison University in 1975 I was streamed into shorthand. That probably had to do with gender, though Mt. A. was the first Canadian university to grant women degrees. Go figure. … Presses palm to forehead. Bows head and shakes it. … I’d also been accepted to MIT. )
Both handwriting and typing have a beautiful fluidity to them, but handwriting is thicker; its viscosity is higher. I looked that up, just to be sure: “Fluids with low viscosity have a low resistance and shear easily and the molecules flow quickly; high viscosity fluids move sluggishly and resist deformation. Some liquids, like pitch, glass and peanut butter, have such high viscosity they behave like solids.”1 For me, handwriting is like peanut butter.
So I typed …
With this dark and painful stuff, our task is to lean in, to turn toward one another, … turn again, and again to the world … to the myriad expressions of itself that life continues to burst into, and beyond, our awareness, without care for our observation or attention, because it is as it will ever be, unravelling in its own brilliant wonder, its own evolutionary time. Beyond whatever devastations, it endures.
We are but stardust. Spun out upon this glittering orb. Layer upon layer, the bones of our ancestors lie locked in their endless yesterdays of possibility, their arguments long softened to desert sands – the countless empty tomorrows that, for them, never came – shifting, ever shifting – still awaiting an answer. It will not come. There is no answer for yesterday, and fewer for tomorrow. The answer is ever and only today. The moment. The turning toward. The reaching out, and the looking within. The answer is you. It is me. It is the little we remember and the vast wilderness of what we’ll never know. And it is the letting go of our sense of failure, the emptiness of too quiet rooms; the goodbye smile we didn’t turn to catch; the hand we let drop because we did not know its fright; the world we could not save from ourselves while holding to our private, our collective desperations. But the world did not need saving. That was only ever us. And here we are, together saving one another. And that, perhaps, may be enough.
What is Viscosity, Microcare. https://bit.ly/4bNPjcn, accessed May 9, 2024.