Just Five Images

On cultivating familiarity from my sick bed.

I took the last month and a half off social media, partially for the sake of rest, and mostly because I was entirely bed-bound with a mystery illness. I’ll spare you the details, but the short story is, I woke up one morning with excruciating pain somewhere deep inside my hip bone.

The first few days, I tried to stay in my apartment. My sister and a couple friends took turns stocking my fridge, cooking food, and helping me shower. As my condition worsened, I could not walk, go to the bathroom, or get out of bed without incredible amounts of help, and incredible amounts of pain. We didn’t know what was wrong. I lost my appetite. My medications caused side effects. I couldn’t sleep.

It was supposed to be my sister’s 30th birthday weekend. Back from New Jersey after four years of a PhD program, we planned on camping across the Colorado Rockies. Instead, I made the slow and awful trip to my mom’s couch, on which I would remain for the following 4 weeks.

I faced the prospect of indefinite bed rest. And, the thing is, I’m a mover. I like to move.

Being trapped (physically or emotionally) has always been my personal nightmare.

Caught in limbo and grappling with this reality, I was reminded of a podcast with Abby Wambach. She relays a metaphor her therapist offered when grieving the death of her brother:

When we find ourselves gutted by experiences we would never willingly choose (our first heartbreak, the death of a child, the sudden loss of a job), a portal opens. It’s temporary, only remaining ajar for that particularly sticky time between the burst and the settling.

On one side of the portal is life as it has always been. This space is familiar, protected, and contained. Staying here is a refusal to change. Or rather, a refusal to choose how you change. Here, you allow fear, grief, and victimhood to press in. You stay small and likely angry.

On the other side of the portal is possibility. By walking through, you integrate whatever great and terrible lesson the unthinkable affords you. The outcome is ultimately unknowable. But it’s true. Here, you create new worlds. Or, at the very least, a new self within this world.

In moments of crisis, do we allow our discomfort to destroy us? Do we rail against reality and refuse the opportunity to change? Or do we lean in to the pain, ask what it has to teach us, and become better friends? Better lovers, husbands, parents, and neighbors?

When the portal opens, what do you choose?

I walked through. Although, I suppose “walk” is a poor choice of words.

***

On the window ledge just above the couch, there was a bouquet of orchids and lilies. My uncle sent them during the worst part of my illness. They arrived on our doorstep, packaged neatly with tiny vials of water encasing the trim of each stem. At first, overwhelmed by the kindness, I held the bouquet in its entirety and cried.

Later, from my sick bed, I began to notice.

First, the way delicate purple petals bled backward into white, hanging half-drained off the branch. Then, the stems, hooked and bowed by the wide-belly warp of the wine decanter. The way, each day, the lilies peeled themselves back petal by petal, revealing scooped and spotted centers. There was a scent, too, when I could get close enough. Week over week, I noticed each leaf like a tiny fist: browning at the tip and slow-clenching toward its center.

I did not mind the dying. I did not mind the drop-petals or wilt.

A little bit of the world was bundled up and brought to my doorstep, and I did not have to move to really lean in.

It marked time. This was my portal. I felt real again.

***

When, several weeks in, I could tolerate sitting for short periods of time, my mom began taking me for wheelchair walks around our neighborhood.

The moment my face felt sunshine, I cried.

I could not stop.

In the weeks prior, my mom started identifying one plant each day. She gave me a tour. On the shady side of the park, there was the Spanish maple completely full of leaves. Then, the light green lilt of the bald cypress tree. She explained that, as a deciduous conifer, it drops its needles in the fall and regrows them every spring. At the most western point of our walking path, there was a manicured cutout full of pink and purple sedum still going strong in late season.

My mom and I took up this task together, using all manner of apps, websites, and books to name our little neighbors.

Each day, I would save my spoons for the prospect of a plant walk… for the sensory delight of sweet, sun-lit discovery.

There was wild lettuce, red clover, and the European Mountain Ash. Russian sage, two different kinds of rabbitbrush, and the rolled-paper flicker of blue gramma grass.

After researching evergreen trees, we began plucking needles from branches and twisting them between our thumbs and index fingers. With pines, the needles are situated in bundles of two, three, or five. With spruce and fir, they cling directly to the branch. If, when plucked, they rolled along our fingerpads and held their spear-like shape, it was a spruce (delight!). If it didn’t roll, like a flat sword soft to the touch, and smelled like fresh-squeezed grapefruit, it was a fir (double delight!).

Among my favorites were the Rocky Mountain beeplant, coyote willow (narrowleaf willow), and the Canadian goldenrod. Our favorite part of the walk is a short stretch where the temperature drops several degrees between the left/right hug of the narrowleaf willows. We affectionately call this Coyote Canyon.

Sedum, bald cypress, and Rocky Mountain beeplant.

Last year, I walked this same path nearly every day… across the bridge, past the duck house, through Coyote Canyon, along the creek. All that time, and I couldn’t name a single plant, save for maybe milk thistle and the common sunflower.

I see my neighbors everywhere now, and I can name them. There is an exchange. A knowing. A newfound intimacy.

Learning about the earth helped me let the light in.

I simply needed to adjust my scope.

My mom, me, and my sister on our last wheelchair walk before I moved home.

I am back in my own apartment. I’m still recovering and the timeline is slow, but I walked through that portal.

In the pit of hopelessness, noticing saved me.

There is a book on herbalism sitting on my shelf. I’ve had it for years, and I finally cracked it open. Now that I’m starting to walk again, I’m learning to forage. I’m learning to identify, collect, and dry… to honey, tincture, and steep… to live alongside the many little lives that took root here in my city, my state, my world.

They’ve always been here. But now, I’m here with them. Really here.

We take better care when we foster familiarity. We become familiar when we take time to notice. And, sometimes, in my case, it takes a life-altering illness to open-heartedly lose track of the time.

I’ve never been consistent with my writing. Now, I plan to be consistent with my noticing, and ideally, write more. I’m starting with just 5 images. Five images to which I give my full attention. An offering.

Five images a day to practice noticing. Hopefully, most days, I’ll have the motivation and willpower to write them down.

Really, I just want to be a good neighbor.

***

Just Five Images from today:

1. There is a katydid caught between my screen and the glass patio door. She is still and green. Leaf-like wings tuck in close to her abdomen. At first, I let her sit still in the waft of morning light. She can have the patio to herself. From the couch, I hear clicks (stridulation, the internet tells me). I watch her peel her legs backward, hooking the mesh with moon-shaped claw feet. Tap, tap, tap of tiny antennae. The slow traverse ends with a crouch and a launch; she attempts to fly away. Instead, she hits glass and bounces back. This process repeats several times and I try to set her free. I offer multiple escape routes. She doesn’t seem to take them. I check on her periodically. Each time I take a peek, part of me hopes she’s escaped. The other part of me aches for her to stay.

2. I sit by the window in my neighborhood coffee shop. Across the street, I watch a black cat wander unleashed. Tethered only by a watchful eye, its tail hovers and flicks like seaweed ten feet deep in saltwater. A slick black body prowling across the lawn. The watcher’s mouth opens. Speaks wordlessly. His body pauses for a moment, then continues, speaking wordlessly.

3. In the park, a couple finds a spot in the sun. They disappear into a hug. Just when I think they can’t get any closer, he sets a water bottle down and melts fully in. They hug so long, I can’t tell if I’m witnessing love or grief. Sometimes, respite looks an awful lot like goodbye.

4. The sky is completely cloudless and a confusing shade of blue. I lean back and imagine swimming through the endless swell. It’s so… still. So unbelievably beautiful. I lean back and I’m transported to this same field, years before, when I came here with my first love before we’d had our first kiss… bodies thrumming with possibility and almost holding hands.

5. I lean forward and lift my palm from the grass. Hundreds of tiny blades pressed into my skin. I peel them off one by one, taking in the tiny network of bloodless wounds. It’s not long before they heal without a trace.

Happy noticing, my friends. Thank you for being here.

Go forth and foster familiarity.

Mic