Dispatch from Carolina
On attention and joy.
Hi Folks (and welcome to your first official Good Folk newsletter),
First, a note: each newsletter you receive will include a song at the top of it. I recommend listening to the song as you read, but of course that is up to you. You can find a full playlist of these songs here, and notes about each song and artist at the bottom of the newsletter.
Today I want to tell you a story.
Three years ago, it was New York City spring and I did not remember who I was. The cherry blossoms were blooming on the trees and the world was beginning to burst back into green and there was not a thing in the world that seemed to be able to bring me back to my body. To remember that I was living a life, one I had been living for a long time, and one that held potential to be lived for even longer. In the noise and solitude of the city, I sat alone and dreamt of the south. Would the trees have grown tall and fanned out, I wondered, their palm fronds whirling in the breeze? Would the hills be dotted once more with wild purple flowers, the humidity hanging thick in the air? Never had I longed for a place so deeply in my life, a place I had spent so long trying to leave behind. It is not that I could not find these things in the city if I had been willing to search for them; it was more a sense of disconnection with my own life, a numbness that had washed over me and taken hold like a flooding wave. For better or worse, I seemed to only feel like a realized person when I was back south. Away from the home I had once known, the world seemed hazed, and nothing felt real, or important. I gazed at sidewalks and at skyscrapers, up at clouds passing in the sky and grasses pressing through the cracks in the road, and I could not connect to a single part of the life I was living.
In retrospect, it is clear to me now that I was dealing with dissociation, though I did not have the words for this at the time. I had closed myself off because I was afraid of the sharpness of the world, the way its edges could cut into the narrative about myself I had carefully constructed. But in doing so, I closed myself off to joy, too. All I wanted were those small moments of connection that make life feel real, but I had no idea how to get back to that. I had no idea how to feel anything at all.
The healing process was difficult and ongoing, and a story for another time. But I knew that there had to be more out there in life. More joy. More community. More jouissance, my favorite word from college lectures. There had to be more. I did not come here to suffer.
A year ago, I moved back south for what was meant to be a few weeks. And I have not yet left. For the past eight months, I have been living in a small town in North Carolina, teaching creative writing at a middle school in an even smaller town. Each morning I drive through the hills with the moon rising through a purple sky on my left and the sun streaking crimson as it lifts on my right. The road, dotted with pine trees and BBQ joints, rusty gas stations and fields of slumbering cows, stretches ahead and I remind myself that I am real. My life, stripped of the dueling excitement and despair of the city, moves slower now. I have time to pay attention. And in that, I have found transcendence, and connection, and a less-crowded path to joy.
Recently I was walking with a friend through the fields on a Friday afternoon. The air was humid and thick with mist. The road bent and we emerged to see the light breaking through the clouds, the dark path glistening with rain. My breath caught, and I was gripped in a moment of connection with the world, so sharp it felt dizzying. This, I remember thinking to myself. This is what joy feels like.
Pay attention to the world. I know it sounds simple, and it is. But that does not mean it is easy. Choosing to turn my focus to what is around me in any given moment has been, at times, an almost impossible challenge. I do not think it will get any easier, but I do not want to return to the life I once lived. I want to move away from my own mind, my own body, my own stories, and believe that there is more out there in the world than me, and with that, more than my pain or hurt. I want to believe there is beauty out there in everything, wherever I am willing to look for it. This act of distancing from my own self is where the real work of empathy can truly begin. And without empathy, there will be no joy.
Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book, The Mother of All Questions, that “this paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences rather than one’s own, of getting out of boundaries of one’s own experience. There’s a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.”
I lost years of my life to that fortress. I do not wish to live like that any longer.
Which leads me to this week’s prompt. Respond to it in any way you see fit, and email your response to goodfolksonly@gmail.com to be included in next week’s newsletter. Or don’t. Keep a journal and write all the prompts out for yourself only. You do you.
Your prompt this week is to tell me about a moment that made you believe there was more out there in the world. The more is open-ended; this could be a belief in something like love or religion, a metaphysical or spiritual force, a possible future for you, a moment that made you feel connected to the world. Don’t think too much about it. Go with the first feeling that comes to your gut.
I’d like to leave you with a Mary Oliver quote from her essay “Upstream.” “Teach the children,” she wrote, “We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daises and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen… Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
See y’all next week,
Spencer
SONG OF THE WEEK: Cowboy by Allison Ponthier
Allison Ponthier is a singer-songwriter from the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Her songwriting hints at her country roots and portrays her experience leaving the Bible Belt for Brooklyn in search of community and coming to terms with her queer sexuality. As she writes on her website, her songs build “an extravagantly realized version of the world she retreated into as a kid back in Texas: a place where difference is endlessly celebrated.”