Being rocked

on stones & grief & comfort

Lately, I have been collecting stones. I bring them with me as I walk this small wintering town, carrying a piece of New Mexico or Illinois with me as I go, placing them on my desk while I write. I’ve been thinking, too, of the word, “rock” — to be someone’s rock, to be their landing place. To rock out. To be rocked and cradled. To be rocked, shook up, astonished— by beauty, grief, or joy. You can rock a jumpsuit. Rock a gold clog. Rock a tattoo.

Each week of February has felt triple its length, and I find myself holding on to these sturdy pieces of earth that have weathered so much. Earthquakes & fire & so many forms of life.

A high-school student sent me a poem in the mail. It began “goddess of the unknown / your domain is authenticity.” I’ve never felt so seen or surprised by a gift, traveling to meet me at my mailbox on a difficult day.

Some days I cannot claim either of those things. But if I were to be a goddess of anything, it would be the messy in-between space. Smoke in my hair, smeared lipstick, Lana Del Rey record skipping while outside, snow begins.

Almost paradoxically, to practice knowing the unknown space, I need clear containers. I need to cry in one patch of sun, and then stand up.

Walking in a snowy field the other day, I felt a second book coming towards me like a freight train.

“Really, like this?” I wanted to ask, thinking of Elizabeth Gilbert’s story of Ruth Stone, from her Ted Talk:

As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming . . . ‘cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, “run like hell” to the house as she would be chased by this poem.

The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would “continue on across the landscape looking for another poet.”

And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first.

That’s kind of what it felt like.

I am tired this week, but I said, “well, okay, then,” and got to work, with stones lining my desk. Each one, a poem. They contain “frozen music,” as Lori Eve Dechar would say.

All around us, the singing.

xoxo

Raisa

PS— in case you need it: