Voice Note: An Extended Reply

My attempt to answer a poignant question from a dear friend and poet

I was on my way to a routine dentist appointment when the voice of my dear friend (an exquisite poet) reached me via voice note, bridging the time and space between us.

Kimberly: Even amongst the chaos and the despair and the heartbreaking reality of life—where does Meg go to find that happy place? In your mind, in your heart, in the world?

So profound this question, especially if you could hear it in Kim’s voice, the way it arrived like falling water. So many times, that happy place has been found in Kim’s friendship, in the birthday gifts they give that are crafted with holy intention. In the fluid alcove our voices make, plying and pleating with our fingers a little bend in the river of time where there is peace and power at once, a portal to a deeper sight, where poetry makes purpose and the path of presence all the more clear.

I listened to what emerged from me on impulse that day in a voice note back to Kim—“Off the rip? I know that joy emerges from each other. Because every time I open back up to connection, that is generally what changes everything.”

This was also what I told my partner as we walked our dogs, savoring the mundanity feeling like miracle when the subject had turned surreal, turned toward world war three which for years was hypothesis or hyperbolic or hope-not. What I told him also was there is nothing, in a daily way, that is going to help us more than dialogue. Not comment sections necessarily but talking with people we love is what is going to pull us out of our heads, off our phones. Letting the energy move through the instrument of the body and connect us more closely to one another.

“Connecting with loved ones, but also with music, with books, and artwork, movies, all these things I know you know too,” I continued to tell Kim, “these are all things that expand us beyond the kind of fear that spirals us downward in a shrinking way. Whenever I remember I need to lighten up, as in deliberately taking the entire world off my one set of eyebrows, out of my jaw, out of my neck, it makes it easier to believe in our own possibility, in taking action. There’s more space for it.”

“And there’s the inner space,” I said, sitting in the parking lot of the dentist’s office, knowing I may very well be visiting that inner space shortly when the drilling into my mouth would commence. “We need that connection maybe more than anything, I think. Meditation, especially with the aid of visualization, really helps transport us deeper into the now.”

(I want to give you what I saw the other night. When I sat down to mediate before bed, almost instantly I saw I was in a river, arms outstretched. It was a moment of deep letting go, or maybe even something in me showing me how to practice it. The gift in letting go is that it is always met with its opposite, its yang—gain. But the yin has to be authentic. I just read The Recovering by Leslie Jamison and she wrote often about dismantling contract theory in our brains. Life isn’t doing x to get y. It’s about doing x and discovering our why inside and beyond that moment. )

It’s important to be where we are, but meditating helps me remember that this is not all that there is. That this is not all that I am. I am connected to everything, to something beyond the bounds of my body, which helps me make contact with the universe within it. (Lately, I’ve been imagining planets within me. A star-studded fabric sparkling within my body, reaching toward the infinite. Suns and moons and planets of this solar system and of those beyond it.)

But a week later, Kim’s question stayed with me. Where do you go? In your mind, in your heart, in the world? I had really only answered it in part, about where I might go in my mind and heart, in that voice memo reply.

In the world—that place, that joy lives in dancing with my dogs and my partner to Bad Bunny music videos, letting a language that is not my native own fumble across my lips as we swing. It lives in the way a laugh reaches upwards through the body, sometimes like it’s a surprise, and accompanied by a silent sigh of relief that it’s still there. It’s in going rollerskating with my friend, Jess, an exceptional horror author who made skating without knowing how a lot less “scary”—letting her hand steady me again and again. It’s in watching the little kids race circles around me in their skates and witnessing their joy embodied, whether they’re falling or flying, they are alive, elated about all of it.

That “happy place” appeared at a community theater performance where dancers rippled their joy from the stage through the crowd who amplified it and sent the joy back on peace fingers forward again. It was like a portal to enter into at the end, when the dancers formed a freestyle circle and cheered on one another’s creative spontaneity and self-expression; the cheering lifting even higher when a little girl took to the center of the circle, dancing at first shyly, then boldly in front of an entire audience. It appears in the eagerness of my students at a spring break creative writing class to share what they’ve made. In their laughter, as they run outside to play.

Several years out of our MFA program, that happy place emerges in getting to be back with the voice of another dear friend & poet, Siera Carpenter—experiencing the texture and sounds of her motion across the page, both new and familiar, as she brings clarity to new depths of womanhood. It’s in hearing an old song and feeling the pieces of self nestling near each other. It’s in the synchronicity: a thought reflected in material reality or the song I woke up hearing in my mind that morning suddenly playing on a spontaneously selected radio station. It’s in opening to a page that touches exactly what I had been feeling. There’s a door to awe in a sentence that stuns me.

It’s in the dappled patterns of a vibrating puddle. In the birds calling to one another, creating a layered symphony in their multi-toned dialoguing. In wind chimes and in the fragrance of the purple Texas Mountain Laurels, blooming. It’s in hearing the voice of someone I love, almost as if I’m hearing it anew. It’s in throwing my legs forward mile after mile and dancing with my hands as if I’m in my own music video. It’s in spotting a car decorated with mermaids and then spotting it again while re-routing, like a sign to keep magic alive. It’s in listening to someone else perform art only they could have made. It’s in the way an audience member at a literary-comedy show wants to share their awe or laughter at Valerie Nies’s production with me too. It’s in the gentle verve of walking and talking happily in a small group—when poet-adventurer, Hollie Hardy starts to story-tell us how she and another woman in the bathroom began bouncing back their nightmares through the stall door, and everyone gravitates toward the center.

It’s in reading the triumphant essays from another talented poet and friend, Sara Bawany, and whispering yes, hope is real and alive, and here is language to prove it. Seeing women triumph on the page, on the stage, and (I can’t witness this without crying) on olympic ice rinks. Going to a coffee shop that feels like home and receiving an iced matcha on the house (thank you epoch coffee!) It’s in being at smushed blueberries and hearing the interconnection synchronously rise to the surface, a lattice of grace. It’s in learning that people are gathering for the sole intention of supporting and exchanging energy. (literally the Support and Energy Exchange Network (SEEN.) And, like of course they are, but to really see this is an event that exists on meetup is so soul-emboldening.)

It’s in watching the sky change colors as the sun rises. It’s a yellow butterfly fluttering past the window. A red tailed hawk surrounded by new spring leaves glowing golden with the setting sun. It’s in the fast moving river of clouds at night, rivulets passing over the moon and imagining if it were really the reflection, if the moon were down here in each of us, illuminating the night we each walk through and share.

That joyful place lives in the true things, the things that make the heart sing.

And I must add, not out of obligation but out of the true experience of these beautiful gifts, is that they never exist in a vacuum. Nothing is separate. I remember when the genocide first started, and while I walked my dog through a sunny day in Austin, Texas, I could hear the sound of children screaming in my brain. I know you too have experienced the deep awareness and its accompanying sorrow of the tragedies happening in the world rippling underneath or alongside or through beautiful moments. There can’t be a full appreciation of these said beautiful moments without that awareness. These gifts, of cherishing beauty, I feel are necessary to cultivate resilience in ourselves so that we can steward hope for a heartbroken world. These moments solidify the commitment that this beauty should be experienced, everyone has the right to breathe fresh air, drink and feel clean water, take shelter somewhere the nervous system can regulate. These human rights should be accessible by everybody, idealistic as it may sound; it is still the truth.

Sometimes, when receiving gifts of synchronicity or peace, this looks like deep reverence and a wishing to extend this felt sensation of beauty and nourishment to everything, imagining the joy leaking out of my body and into the invisible root system that connects all of us. In Buddhism, there’s a practice of offering “good impressions” that the benefit of positive experiences might extend to others, like wavelengths of light reaching into what binds us all. I imagine a celestial canyon, a vast corpus callosum where these glimmers of hope become electric impulses firing into the “One Mind,” a term taught in A Course in Miracles. Sometimes, it looks like this meditative-wishing, sending ripples out from the heart’s energy field (which I recently learned is bigger than our body.) Other times it’s doing something to extend the heart’s joy, calling someone you love, sending them a letter, taking action in the community, something to propagate that shimmering light in some way.

And sometimes, that happy place does not come through the delight of bright colors strewn, but the deep resounding tone of allowing the pained emotions’ truth. That door appeared for me last week in Hanif Abdurraqib ‘s poem “There’s Something Here from Elsewhere:” “a group of moths is called and eclipse & there’s the terror I was after.”

Our heart is a grotto where the water of everything we feel must be allowed passage, to flow through with our deep, nonjudgemental acceptance. These moments of joy we train our eyes and our minds to see and magnetize are like flowers we plant along the banks of that spring, hoping the reflection plants its own seeds.

If you were to extend your joy imagery into the comments, that would be so cool. Now I am imagining a litany of loveliness, of medicine for the heart’s vision and the soul’s expression. Where do you go? In your mind, in your heart, in the world? How do you hold space for yourself and for all that is happening—for your hope, your innocent, heart that loves this world and can’t help but want its healing? What does your peace look like?