People on the ground have to go on.  Today while driving downtown, police stalked every corner and bag inspection tents were set up outside of venues, but if you only saw the people it would feel like nothing happened.  Life goes on.  Help or be on your way.  The many creative ways this city has reached out to support its own have been refreshing and healing.  All the offerings of food, shelter, blood, solace, employment, prayers, and hugs have become fluent throughout the area’s social landscape.  But this scenario is too familiar for me to hope for any lasting positive change to blossom.  We are always our best when we have no choice.  It is in our DNA to work together to survive, and we do so in beautiful ways.

What has been plaguing my mind since this happened is what will materialize when the shock wears off.  What will we become as the pain sinks in?  Or in those moments when we once again feel alone in our suffering?  When we have no answers?  When no one is watching?  Will we digest our rage and fear so it is metabolized into something useful, or will we implode?  Will familiar faces become suspect?  Will we continue to stand so united when the day-to-day returns, or will we feed on one another’s differences?

Lovely, gracious, powerful.  Such aspects of humanity can arise from these situations – but it does make for one steep, dark descent if we fall.  I want to believe we are stronger than that.  People around the country are already unraveling on one another over this, but Bostonians do not share their convenience of distance and for now they are sticking together.  If this is what defines being ‘Boston strong’, then let it be a permanent lesson to all of us in what we will become rather than some moment of ephemeral tenderness from who we once were.

Keep a kite on you at all times (backpack, trunk, etc.).  You never know where you’ll be when the wind picks up.

Introduce yourself to the trees in your neighborhood and visit them regularly.

Move at your own pace (mine is molasses).  Let the rush and chaos of urban dwellers flow around you like a stream does a heavy rock. The more weighted down you are with your own intention and movement, the less you will get tossed around.

Be prepared to be the last one eating if joining some locals, and don’t take it personally if you are abandoned at the table to finish on your own.  It’s common here for people to move on quickly before allowing their food to settle.

If you can, get a pet so you have a companion.

Look people in the eyes.  It helps curb the feeling of being invisible. 

Don’t be surprised or offended if someone misinterprets a kind gesture to help.  People here often assume you have an ulterior motive for pausing to lend them a hand.  Don’t let their suspicions hinder your offering either – be true to the manners you were raised with.

Develop a cosmopolitan palate, you won’t regret it.  Most of the time.

Build an arsenal of quiet spaces where you can reconnect with birdsong and butterflies.

Never mind multi-tasking.  If it doesn’t suit you then remember how lucky you are to instinctually pause.  Being genuinely present in the moment is something they are trying to teach folks here about anyway, so consider yourself ahead of the curve.  Besides, science is on your side.

Keep your recipes from home close at hand.  You’d be surprised how grounding it can be to have the scent of fresh biscuits wafting through the house, or crunching into a crisp pickled carrot, or leaning into a bowl of your grandmother’s soup and have the steam touch your face.

Get some plants so you keep in practice of nurturing.

Don’t be afraid to laugh out loud, even if you’re the only one.  Things can always lighten up a bit in a place where so many take themselves very seriously.

Find a place outside of town with little light pollution and remember to make trips to look at the stars.  Seeing the night sky with clarity is important.

Keep a library of movies, books, and music that remind you of where you come from so you can remember what it’s like to relate to other people that feel familiar.

Hold on to your sense of doing things for yourself, even if it’s easier to pay someone else to do them.

Don’t try too hard to make friends. People tend to flee at the first sign of loneliness.

People here love country stories.  Delight them, but never allow your experiences to be taken as token novelty.

Avoid the shackles of scheduling your every waking moment.  Leave ample room for spontaneity.

Relish in anonymity.  Experiment with your life as though nobody is paying attention – they aren’t.

Get to know your libraries, museums, and farmers’ markets.  They will help develop your sensibilities.

Don’t worry if socializing feels awkward.  People here speak in sarcasm the way we do in metaphor, so give yourself some slack if you are constantly finding things going over your head.  They probably don’t understand you either.

Keep your wits.

© Mayme Snow

We are slow dancing in the kitchen. I was late for work twenty minutes ago, she has been coding in front of the computer for hours by now and is still in her pajamas.

“Ah ah, boo. Stay with me.”

The curve of her back fits perfectly in my palm. I am not aware of my other hand or her fingers wrapped gently around it. We are moving in step to a silent mutual rhythm.  Every time she speaks I am drawn back to her eyes: auburn, sparkling, kind. Looking into them while knowing they are looking into me, seeing me as I am right now, and still wanting to stay for this dance fills me with gratitude. She reminds me of how good it can feel to be alive in my skin.

The joy is fleeting, but not diminished, as my mind returns back to the narrative playing in the background. It is dark, depleting, and violent. Another flashback has decided to join us.

We keep dancing. My body wants to stay present while my mind meanders back into the past to figure something out that’s necessary right now.  I don’t know its reason or its urgency to interrupt this morning.  I keep in step, trying to figure out if there’s ever been a way to balance such stark contrasts of reality in a single moment while honoring both.  I’m still not sure it’s possible.

My wife watches my eyes go distant and helps. “Ah ah,” she coaxes. “Stay here with me.”

Whatever it is that I need to do to live with these things, it is worth the dance.

© Mayme Snow

I can’t believe this is home
here
where I can cool off my feet in
the black night ocean
as every approaching swell seems to be
a wink
a tease
of whether or not I will be consumed
into fluid nothingness

The Boston skyline lazily stands behind us
while planes leaving Logan
cross the Harbor like falling stars
stuck on rewind
lighthouses in the horizon blink morse code
“tag, you’re it”

There is an immigrant man sitting in his car
door open
mariachi blaring on the fuzzy AM
and I wonder how far he needs to daydream
before he, too,
can feel at home.

© Mayme Snow

When I arrived at the beach I quickly learned that I was the only soul in sight.  Snow drifts nestled into the dunes making the landscape a barren calico of sand, powder, grass, and drift wood.  The Atlantic wind bit my eyes and cheeks as its gusts led the sea in a feverish dance.  Waves crashed in roaring laughter while a flock of seagulls stood in mourning around a dead beloved.  It was a good morning for a funeral.

I walked along the creeping tide as it reached out and teased my feet.  Beyond the coast the water was as dark as midnight.  I headed eastward towards the horizon.  The entire sky, save for a sliver to the West, was full of snow clouds that had no intention of moving along any time soon.  For a half-hour I perused this beach in the most sincere sense of solitude one could imagine.  I had never had the sea all to myself.  Every step was an unspoken dialogue between us and I was humbled to be alone in such company.  Sometimes I would stop and listen after each stride, other times I broke out into a full run so my lungs could lap up the cold air.  

The only evidence of the sun cresting over the Earth were the glowing clouds hanging right in front of it and the shaving of orange sky that tailed the storm on its opposite horizon.  I realized the opportunity had come and gone and turned to go back towards the car, headlong into the wind.  Throughout the entire walk I kept feeling like the ocean was whispering something to me that I could not make out.  It was a secret that could not be shared from far away — if I wanted to hear it, I had to get closer.  Pins and needles wrapped the front of my legs as they pushed against the frigid air.  I could only take a couple of pictures at a time before my bare fingers would begin to throb from exposure.  Whatever the ocean had to say, it could hang on to it for now.

Yet, as I got closer to the trail that cut back through the dunes to the parking lot, something inside of me kept tugging at the sleeve of my mind.  I kept looking over my shoulder at the waves who seemed to beckon me the way a mother does to a child with her index finger.  You better get over here or you’re gonna regret it.  Then it hit me. “Ah shit,” I said out loud.  I lifted my face and snowflakes caressed my closed eyelids while I giggled.  I got the message: I was going for a swim.

I stood there for a few minutes, wondering if this was a good decision or if  I had gone bat-shit crazy.  I also wanted to make sure that my limbs still had enough warm blood running through them so I wouldn’t seize up in the water and drown.  The temperature outside was fourteen degrees fahrenheit and that didn’t account for the windchill.  I didn’t have a towel or blanket or any other clothes in the car; I was going to have to go in commando style.

So, it was on the beach at Race Point on a winter’s morning that I stripped down to my t-shirt, panties, and wool socks before running into the water like a crazy person.  It was anything but graceful.  I kept hitting holes in the tiny ponds that had pooled up just before the waves, at one point sinking all the way up to my thigh in soupy sand.  I thrashed around and desperately kept trying to run towards the waves before my legs cramped up.  Seaweed and stones tumbled under a glass of midnight blue and I lunged in, landing between waves and missing the water.  I went further out until I was up to my waste and squatted into a wave rolling towards me.  The water passed through my shoulders like a steely apparition and my breath was instantly gone.  I wanted to stick my head under but my lungs spasmed so I cupped my hands and baptized my head with salt water until my hair clung to my scalp and the salt ran into my eyes.

By the time I ran out of the sea, my body was as rigid as a hickory stick and my limbs were the color of pink grapefruit, save for my fingers and toes which had a slight shade of purple.  I took off my shirt before realizing one of my socks was missing so I turned back in my bra and ran out to pluck it from the surface while it was still floating.  My chest felt like it had been hit by a bus.  The air burned my wet skin and I couldn’t move fast enough to get my dry clothes on. My hoodie stuck to my arm so I threw it to the ground and pulled my jacket on.  My pants were next.  I took off the other sock and scraped my sandy feet into my shoes.  I would carry my shirt, gloves, hat, and hoodie back to the car.  Time seemed to slow down into increments of inhalations during the hike back through the dunes.  It felt like the longest walk of my life as my body continued to shut down with every step.  Thoughts of frostbite and heart attack ran through my mind as my knees stopped bending.  The sand was not kind to my cramping muscles as my calves turned to stones under the skin.  When I reached the car, I tossed my clothes into the trunk and sat in the seat with the heat blowing full-blast despite the engine still being cold.

I don’t know how long I sat there.  I do know that while I sat there, the pain that followed the thawing of my senses was among the most excruciating pain I had ever felt.  Unlike experiencing blunt trauma or being in an accident where you feel the impact just before the body goes into shock, the pain that comes from gelidity is exactly the opposite in that once it is felt, it continues to crescendo until it becomes agonizing.  The only relief I found was to yell.  I fumbled with the stereo to distract myself with some music.  Then, during the opening notes of ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ by the Waterboys, I began to weep uncontrollably.  I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  I’m sure most of it was from my body releasing some of the energy that came from the pain of nearly freezing to death.  But there was also the secret.  I’m not going to tell you what the sea said to me that day, it is not my secret to share.  I will tell you that it was there, in that fogged-up Hyundai on a dark snowy morning in the middle of an abandoned parking lot, that for the first time in a long time I felt like I was going to be alright.  This impromptu visit to the beach had become more than a tender moment of solitude, it was to be a reconciliation between the world and I for the sense of being alive.

© Mayme Snow

rather
than just mere lonliness -

we’re all lonely;

I wonder
if it’s true
we were ever connected,

or if that
was just another
childhood
daydream.

© Mayme Snow

Now I am not a love-all-turn-the-other-cheek-everyone-is-good type who thinks every person deep down has the capacity to be Mahatma Gandhi. Let’s be realistic. There are assholes in this world just as there are humbling human beings. There are also just as many shades of grey in between as there are people in the world. Because we come in all sorts of deviations, relationships are tough.

So what does it mean to act out of love? I think there are two different questions to simultaneously ask to in order to find this answer: (1) Am I coming from a place that honors who I am? (2) Are my motivations surrounding this person sincere? By pausing to focus on these two questions, I am becoming more literate to how things like sacrifice, compassion, selfishness, and intention look for me. I am learning how to gauge each specific relationship and then act accordingly to their answers. This has caused me to become closer to some people in my life as I have become more aware of how much I appreciate them. For others, it has meant initiating an introduction to the curb.

I used to think that trying to mend or maintain a relationship with someone meant that I was being a good person. Sometimes even the bigger person. In reality there are relationships that are worth keeping and there are those who seem to be nothing more than a habit or someone I latch onto for the sake of the familiar. These people tend to come from the past – although they can instantly form out of the present as well – and often they take up an internal space or need that I am not yet ready to be accountable for. A wise person once told me that before I seek a relationship with my mother, I must first learn how to be a mother to myself so that way the relationship is sincerely about connecting to one another as who we are now rather than me placing my needs for security or tenderness on someone who may or may not be capable of meeting them. I think this is a great foundation for anyone we might seek out.

As far as trimming back, the faux pas of letting someone go needs to be dropped. There is no reason to feel like a bad or uncaring person to question the validity of your feelings towards someone else. There is also no reason to feel guilty to cut them out of your life. I think it is just as compassionate to show love and affection to those you cherish as it is to turn your back to those that bring you down. Yes, there is a risk of looking like a jerk for walking away from someone; other people may not understand that sometimes we can hurt each other out of honesty, but reputation is hardly an excuse to forego truth. Sharing your truth is an act of love despite the consequences.

I suppose it comes down to this: the people I want in my life are those who can compliment the things I want to nourish within myself. If I do not want to spend time with someone, then I won’t. There is nothing noble about being a martyr of self-imposed obligations. Besides, whatever is spent on shallow relationships is taken away from those that matter – such as time, energy, resources, or emotions – whether it’s with our self or someone else.

© Mayme Snow

Don’t be afraid, it’s only love

Love is simple

Don’t be afraid, you’re already dead