Thank God For All My Limbs

I’ve always been interested in details. Since I was a little girl, more concerned with what was right around me than dreaming of what could be around me. Obvious to me at a young age that I could not trade out my real experience (however good or bad) for a fake one that suited me more. What did it matter if a certain thing was true, like God, if I couldn’t feel my own way towards it? Concluding similarly, where’s the beauty in a whole forest if you can’t intimately know each tree that sustains it?

I think it’s the same reason fiction scares me. There are too many true stories to tell. Too many gritty details that don’t require fabrication. How does someone turn those down to invent a life they haven’t even lived? Making up senses to correlate with characters that associate with an arbitrary moment in time — too terrifying for me to imagine. That’s like dealing with a ball of yarn that has no beginning or end, so you cut a random piece somewhere in the middle and hope it unravels in the way you want it to. I know deep down this is just my perception, but as we know, perception turns out to be our actual truth. It’s how we make decisions and how people are impressed upon our minds. We must fight to believe ours is not the only kind out there.

In his piece, What Mary Oliver Taught Me, David W. Berner recalls his time with a small cohort of writers that sat together years ago in an old abbey in the English countryside. They shared in their collective craft which splintered in such opposite ways, could the craft even be considered collective? “The fiction writers said the creative nonfiction writers had the hardest job, writing about themselves. So daunting, they would say.” Ha! Our selves are our only hope of knowing anything at all. What a wildly different perception than us nonfiction folk who saw fiction the same way I’ve come to, scared shitless at their regular fantasies realized from thin air. And the poets, he said, “They smoked more cigarettes than anyone else in the group.” Fearless. Carrying around so many notebooks. Easy to fall in love with.

Almost always, we write, speak, think, behave directly through the lens in which we see the world. Our perception shapes the advice we offer, the hills we die on, the issues we tend to. I’ve become aware of this in my adult friendships and been surprised by it. Humbled, too.

A boy who wrestles mightily through panic comes to me. Just as an honest observer, not in search for an answer that will cure. Usually, I’ll listen and sit and that’s all. As Fred Rogers tells us, when a thing becomes mentionable, it very well might finally be manageable. In which case, a silent presence does the trick just fine.

But if I ever offer more than just my tuned ear, what seems appropriate for me to say is always delivered in tangibles. Helping people literally feel their way towards the whole truth, something I’ve done since I was small. For instance, what good does it do to tell a panicky person about the peace of God when their heart is palpitating and they just want to control their breath. Of course, that’s my perception. It lands for some and not for others. I’ll ask questions like, “Where in your body did you feel the sadness?” Or, “What were you doing immediately before that happened?” I studied behavior at university and we learned the importance of analyzing our atmosphere, pinpointing what’s around us when we do a thing (motivating or punishing us) in order to modify what that thing is.

I’ll wonder if mindful movement won’t help a person get unstuck. Or if drinking water and sleeping a full night will recalibrate a person’s mind, reorient a person’s heart. And it’s always been helpful for a friend to point out to me that if I’m too distracted in a day to eat, then I’m all around too distracted. Senses engaged, the environment specific, and awareness of the Self high. Processing events first through the tactile maze that makes us notice what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and how that relates to the bigger picture. Notes of observation that would scare the ever-loving daylights out of the fiction teller.

Even though this is my lens, it doesn’t stop me from feeling shame when I stand next to the poet still. She doesn’t obsess over the senses or what he ate or drank that day. She’ll remind the boy that he is not what he worries about, that he’s much more evolved. That prayer has the power of a thousand suns and that birds don’t fret so why should we. She takes him up high and says there’s no use in becoming acquainted with each tree in the world when he has a picture right here of what’s promised to him. Why feel our way toward something when we can romantically trust that it’s there? A dense, nutrient-rich forest of spirited scripture. Dripping with encouragement, not afraid of anything.

I’ve been challenged, convicted, and cared for by the poets and the fiction-tellers in my life. I’ve done my best to advise people like they do, to die on their hills and to tend to their same issues. And though I have borne witness to the fruits of their labor and share in their collective craft, I’m becoming comfortable in the knowledge that we employ our words differently. And I can be refined by the gift of their work without compromising the gift of mine.

We lack imagination and wonder without fiction. We lack beauty and mystery without poetry. And we lack honesty and humanity without nonfiction. As long as we can exist under the notion that ours is not the only one out there, perhaps we’ll care for our world deeper, wider, more fully. In terms of Christianity, perhaps we’ll delight in the limbs that make up a body. In the words of William Blake, “He who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole, must see it in its Minute Particulars...and every Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.” 

There are many stories to tell, some true, some beautiful, some good, and an infinite way of telling them. Your view of the world, therefore your contribution, will be linear regardless of which lens you see from. And creation will never know its Creator linearly. We’ll need the forest and the trees, employing our words long, tall, wide, as well as deep to understand the ultimate truth. Our final Vision, perfect and whole. On our own, just men, but as co-laborers, we’re divine members of a collective craft. Artful stories are a mere means to our end, a reflection of our Divine image, and we can fall on our knees grateful now that our way is not the only one out there.