Everything Is Green
On freedom, discipline, and the colors of springtime.
Happy Sunday Folks,
Here is a moment of serendipity for you: last week, our song of the week was Green River by Creedence Clearwater Revival. A few days after that newsletter went out, I was driving through Western North Carolina to a cabin for the weekend, and on the way there looked to my right and saw the sign for Green River, right by where we ended up staying. It was one of those moments in life that reminds me that I really know nothing, and that life— no matter how static or stuck it has felt this past year— still has the capacity to surprise me.
Green is my favorite color. Recently, some friends and I were discussing each other’s aura colors, and while they informed me mine is a golden yellow, in my mind I will always be green. Green is the color of renewal, of sprouting. Green is what the world bursts into each spring when it wakes back up, when it breathes itself into life once more. Each year I forget how breathtaking this process is, and how sudden. One day you turn a corner and where before the world had felt lifeless and gray, now it teems with being, stretching and reaching out until green encompasses all.
In this wash of color, everything becomes beautiful. The highways, the barns, the rusted train tracks. Wildflowers appear and populate, growing between all the cracks, forcing their way into unlikely places. A road that had before been just a road suddenly means everything to me. Look, how the trees droop and wallow, the way the flowers weigh down the branches. Look, how the sky appears so bright against this wash, no matter whether it is blue or clouded. The green takes over everything and remakes it in its image, building anew the world each April.
This time of year, North Carolina is all green. I do not have the words to even attempt to describe it. As I drove through the winding hills, windows down, I felt each moment that this had to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in the world, a feeling that replicated each curve and bend I made. In the cold winter months, I had forgotten that the world could look this way. Everywhere I go now I think of David Foster Wallace’s excellent short story, “Everything Is Green”, where the wash of sudden green turns the world around the characters into something beautiful for those who are willing to look. Everything is green she says, Wallace writes. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when every thing outside is green like it is.
In this story, Mitch doesn’t see the green. Instead he sees the other trailers out the window, the beer cans and cigarette butts floating in puddles from the rain, the gravel lot and the empty clothesline next door. But Mitch sees Mayfly. He sees her as she looks out the window and whispers to herself that Everything Is Green. And I look at her, Mitch says, and there is something in me that cannot close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.
In this version of the story, I have been both Mitch and Mayfly. I have witnessed the beauty and been brought to something true by it, but before that, I could only see the others around me, and how they seemed to be witnessing something that I would never experience, a feeling that left a widening gap of loss blossoming inside of me. Ultimately, this is a story about empathy, as all stories really are. Say her name, Mitch says, and in doing so, he tells us to see ourselves as he sees Mayfly: as morning, as renewal. As green.
I have complicated feelings about David Foster Wallace the man, but as a writer, much of his work fundamentally has to do with empathy. Even the way his fans approach their adoration of his work forces an empathetic approach (I highly recommend Sasha Chapin’s essay for Hazlitt about reconciling with DFW’s suicide). But there is perhaps no greater example of Wallace’s call for empathy than his famous “This Is Water” speech, which he gave to to the Kenyon College Class of 2005 at their graduation.
It is likely that you have encountered this speech before, but even if you have, I recommend taking a moment to listen back to it. I have it in book form on my nightstand and try to make an effort to skim it at least once a week, if for no other reason than to remind myself of his definition of freedom, which is as follows:
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
This act of freedom is, in fact, one of empathy, which is a conscious, difficult practice. Empathy, which we will continue to define as this newsletter goes on, is not our default setting, but a choice that we must make. And beyond that, it is not a choice we make once and then are done with, a singular moment where all our emotional capacities come together in a grand flash. The practice of empathy is a choice we must make in every moment, every day, for the rest of our lives. It is tedious, and exhausting. It is not fun or thrilling or nice to realize that our lives are not, in fact, about us, or at least they should not be only about us. This realization can lend itself to depression, dispossession, and the sense that you have been lied to all your life, in all you have been taught. But it is also this realization that can lead you on the path to deeper connection, to, as DFW says, real freedom, away from this sense of loss that underlies American culture, which is hinged on rugged individualism and the hollow, always-just-out-of-reach promise of the American Dream.
To sum all this up: conscious attention and awareness of the world around you is a discipline that will lead you to greater empathy, which is the real freedom we have in this world. The freedom to choose how we react, to hold that there are infinite possibilities to everything and everyone, and that we will never be able to know everything, so we might as well release that need and focus on how we show up in each moment. It is possible that the car that just cut you off in traffic is an asshole and an aggressive driver, just as it is possible that they just got a call that a family member is in the hospital and are now rushing there immediately. The point is that we don’t know, and we must live in that unknowing. This is where empathy begins, and the greater work continues when we decide that we will care regardless.
None of this is easy. None of this will happen instantaneously. The practice of empathy— and within that, unlearning all of the biases and cultural practices that have trained us against it— is lifelong work. But it is important. I believe that more than anything. And I will be right here alongside you on this journey.
Here is your prompt this week: what color is your life? Think of how you see yourself, and then ask at least 3 people around you what they think. Now go outside of yourself and think about the world around you. What color is it? If you could remake the world, what color would you choose for it?
Write in to goodfolksonly@gmail.com and share your work with us. Or chat about empathy. Or just send photos of how green the world looks where you are.
Have a great week, friends.
— Spencer
This week’s song is “Howling” by Cathedrals. While I was off-grid this week, I finally finished Madeline Miller’s book, Circe, which absolutely floored me. I listened to this song for the entire last 100 pages, and then for hours on repeat as I wandered the woods, looking for green.
Cathedrals is a duo from San Francisco, comprised of Brodie Jenkins and Johnny Hwin. Jenkins grew up in California wine country under the influence of folk and Americana, and was a part of a traveling family band in her teens. Hwin is the son of Vietnamese refugees and grew up in a small town called Hercules. The duo came together through SF artist collective, The SUB, and weaves together soulful, gothic melodies, folk roots, and indie dreamwave into their songs. This song specifically will make you feel as if you are living in a waking dream.