Aching for Comfort

Is anyone in charge here?

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s a tradition now, walking in the woods around the farm on a Sunday afternoon in between teaching sessions. The tradition began because I wanted to learn what it felt like to do normal-people-weekend-things and the word woods didn’t really do justice to the protected forest around the farm.

I wanted to do normal-people-things while getting to know the forest without an agenda or because I had a workshop, or because people were trespassing, or because I heard gunfire, etc.

I learned that if I was very still, I could watch the bass swim between the lily pads in the pond and that some of the bass were big and ancient like slick water dragons. I watched for their bubbles on the surface of the water and let them call my eyes to their movement. The bass showed me how hard my eyes had gotten.

And when the breeze caught the surface of the water in certain lights and angles, the light crackled like jewels, like sun-glitter bright enough to hear.

I learned that the heron skims the pond more often than I thought and that its wings swooped with a felt-sense before its flight was visible. (I want to give the heron a pronoun, but I can’t tell them apart yet. Is there one? Is there a pair of them? How long has this heron been here? Do these questions even matter?)

In the midst of one of these explorations, I added objects and trash to a pile I’d been forming filled with curiosities the neighbors left beside the spring that feeds the pond.

“You know what we need to come to terms with?”

Christopher emerged from a line of trees with a pitchfork, a tiny shovel, and a broom he’d found at the earthen base of an upturned oak. “No one listens to us when we ask them not to litter?”

“That we’re the grandparents now. That we need to own it. That we have permission to step into that role and that it’s an honor. We need to exercise our grandparent rights.”

Christopher propped the implements on the smooth bark of a birch that was notched with people’s names and initials. He pointed at the scars in the bark, “This is bullshit.”

“Grandparenting?”

“No, what they’ve done to the tree.”

Christopher was born with the mind of an eighty-year old man. It’s not hard for him to stretch into the role of The Bearer of Common Sense. He fiddled with the found-tools until they formed a little pyramid of meaning, like a reverse trident.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s time for us to own it.”

---

I was raised by my grandparents. One suffered from early-onset dementia and the other suffered from unquenchable drive. They both suffered with each other, but they offered my existential suffering a home-base of belonging. They kept me safe and in clothes and mostly fed. They were patient with my sarcasm because they understood that it was a product of the family they had formed somewhere between the cotton mills and the country club.

They were responsible for me — my existence, and also my very existence.

I’ve since met a lot of grandparents raising their children’s children and while I don’t have children of my own, I do have a vast family tree of foundlings and borrowed kids that I send home as we lock the farm up for the night. A few who have stuck around for a decade or so (or more) are instructed to make sure I am placed in a bearable assisted living facility surrounded by interesting people if the dementia that vines its way through my DNA decides to gene-express through me.

But this isn’t an essay about getting old. What I’m writing about is safe harbor — the people and places that feel inviting, the people who create the environments that allow us to breathe and gather our bearings.

Because once I realized that I didn’t feel at home in many places, it was obvious that the sensations that I had labeled anxiety were really a collection of feelings that signaled to me how deeply out of sorts and uncomfortable I felt in my daily world. I didn’t have a home inside of me to carry.

It’s hard to relax when we’re always on guard. Or at least it is for me.

---

Cottagecore

I have this recurring visualization that probably began when a teacher led me through a guided visualization or I was listening to a meditation app or I was instructed, somehow, to close my eyes and be still.

It begins with me walking up to a wooden house in a forest. I hear the splintered, silver-old wood creak beneath my feet as I cross the front porch. I do not have to knock. I am expected.

This place exists in an eternal twilight. Old lamps with flickering bulbs lead me to a hearth fire in the kitchen. A table in the center of the room is covered with herbs and bottles. From the earthen damp of the cellar beneath the floorboards to the dried plants along the rafters, this house smells like home.

It’s easy to settle into a chair at the table without an invitation. Nothing I can say or do here is wrong.

A woman stirs a cast iron pot that hangs above the fire. Her back is to me. She’s speaking before she turns to fill a bowl that is waiting for me on the table. In these visualizations, we hold long, deep conversations but I can never remember her words when I surface and think back on my time with her.

She fills my bowl with rich stew and sits with me as I eat.

She is old, like the forest. Old in a way that is filled with regeneration and life. Old like a gemstone cracked from ancient mountains, a dirt-burnished surface hiding a brilliant core that prisms in the light.

I am infused like an herbal tea by my time spent with this woman.

For many years this visualization was the only place I felt at home until I started to build a home deep inside of myself. And I’m convinced that the words that this old woman in a forest kitchen spoke to me, the conversations that I can’t remember, are what built the bones of the home I carry with me now.

The world is hungry for comfort and wisdom — for belonging and quiet and rest.

Mary Madeline Ridley, my 3rd great-grandaunt, whose portrait by Rudolph F. Ingerle once hung at the visitor center at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina.

---

Grandparent yearning is at an all-time high. From #cottagecore to prairie dresses at Target stores to an obsession with houseplants. We desperately want someone else to be in charge. We want comfort.

We want someone to tell us it will all be okay because it feels very much like it most certainly will not.

Maybe every living civilization has felt this way.

As I watched Christopher construct an upside-down trident from discarded tools and the words left my mouth, “. . . that we have permission to step into that role and that it’s an honor,” I felt myself shed the fears that were meant to keep us uncomfortable, the magic trick of busyness and chaos that shields the simple answers.

I’m finally okay with being the person in charge of the things that have been entrusted to my safekeeping. I feel confident with the role.

And when I doubt the answers that rise up from my gut, I have the bones of the bones of the women who came before me cooking stew in a forest kitchen, the table where I am always welcome, and I can rest and find nourishment and breathe.

Shedding doubt and discomfort, we can all embody the comfort of our elders It's not an age thing, it’s a state of mind. No previous grandmother wisdom is required and your grandparents could have genuinely sucked. They were hungry for this too, but they didn’t have anyone to show them the way. It wasn’t acceptable for them to question the system or work internal magic.

But you can.

And if you need a table where you can sit and rest a bit, my metaphorical and veritable table is waiting for you.

Love,
Kim

---

I’m opening up June’s online Journaling Workshop to all my paid subscribers. While I still count on seeing many of you in person this month, Sunday, June 30th, 1-3 EST will be a stand-alone event with different prompts and more time spent speaking our minds and writing together. Now’s the time to join as a paid subscriber if you’ve been wondering what all this journaling madness is about.

---