Rambling
Long Version, Wide Vision
I’m rambling, my friend says over the phone.
Voice messages, text messages, a quicker cadence. Instant tech to connect us. Emails and messages. The year is a clock ticking. I open a message clocking in at four minutes, thirty seven seconds. It’s not a burden, I think. I send it back in an instant. No, keep going, I tell my friend. Each moment is a joy to listen. I listen on a break. I listen on the subway, in a parked car, in the sunlight, and savor every second. The city is often a sprint. We are long winded, short with each other, out of breath. We are breathless in the pursuit of our lives. We are walking fast, thinking in sprints in place of breathing deeply and slowing down. I’m sorry, we take turns saying in messages back, until the affirmation balms the apology and we learn to remember the shape of connecting that is the long road, the wide view, the voice that takes up space, the scenic route that winds around, absent any sorry, and says: Take your time. And then: Tell me the long version.
*
First frost comes and I open to a blank page. I sit at my desk. The sun is sparse and thinning. The house is cold and the page is a horizon. I am alone, and in the moment my relationship to the page is flecked with the flavor of urgency: a plate acrid and burnt and over salted, this pressure to arrive somewhere fast, to write something, now, anything. It’s the taste of demanding expression, and it springs up as tension, an imbalance as a result of second guessing my creative process. I am too concerned with arrival. I am applying too much heat to my creative life, and pressure. This bitter taste: I notice it, and spit it out. I shrug my shoulders, take a deep breath, walk around the block.
I walk long through the city, imagining the future. I aim for nothing but process and noticing. I practice presence. I ramble. Tell me the long version, I say to myself. And then: Slow down. At mile three, I settle, feeling images form, feeling words turn on against the navy night, vision unfolding in the cold air. Cold but revived, my memory arrives again, and words once stuck flow into the evening.
The process is a well-balanced bite, a cup of chamomile steeped in a hot water, and I’m soothed, simmering in presence and remembering. Walking and breathing are the ingredients for unlocking. I envision heat and summer, days of roaming around. I let myself ramble. I stretch limbs and thoughts and memories back longer recalling hot days, longer sunlight, and ten miles of walking. I roam longer down roads of remembering toward an even further past: down hundred-mile highways, flow state of car rides, and silence in the desert, times of being at once full of breath and breathless. Memory is a wellspring, and I fill my cup when I return there. Slow, and savor, and sip from images, sounds, shapes housed in the psyche. Travel slow down the pathways of memory, holding the resonance of experience like a hand, warm and steadying.
Memory, a connection and currency reviving reminders of city lights, desert skies, and how sunlight quickens the pace of a creative heartbeat. “To be running breathlessly,” Anne Carson writes, “but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” Memory is the thread I hang onto, one that acts as anchor and reminder, one that feeds wider visions of the future. I sip from the past, tune in to the process, and let the visions carry me, wide, reminding myself about the process, and the long road, and what lies ahead.
To write is to become acquainted with slowness and noticing. To slow is to befriend your inner life, to meditate on attentiveness and follow with care along the route of your noticing. Georgia O’Keeffe, walking through the desert at length, termed her long walks “rambles” — times where connecting with the landscape of the Earth and the landscape of her mind mind that no doubt infused her process with the colors, textures, and form in light and paint we know of today.
In the effort and aim toward efficiency, we can often lose the gift of slowness. We forget to ramble, to wander, to see flower bloom, color shift, horizon lines, and long stretches of cloud cover and daylight. Urgency flavors days with bitterness in place of conversations like salted honey until we remember that to go slow is a balm, then, to meander is to hope, and to wonder is to not-yet arrive. To wander can be a delight.
Where does curiosity lead? Where does wonder guide? What visions might unfold in ideation and imagination and the threads of pleasure? I write and slow and walk into the night in the days approaching winter. Page is no longer pressure, but a source of relief. I write about memories and visions. I write until the sunlight fades, until the pages fill, until the pen dies. I’m rambling, I think, and then keep going.
Let the gift of presence be the connector, the scenic route. Let the long drive drop you away from efficiency, relaxing into the space of flow, and wonder, and time beyond time. Let your process and practice be the space you to go like the warmth of a friend. Let your connections be the currency that help you remember: this is life, this is how it’s being lived. There, slow down. See the sidewalk, the city nights, and the invisible tethering with each other. Infuse warmth, strength, care, sweetness, into moments of wonder. Breathe strength spaciousness. There, awe moves in. Winter, inching toward.
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Reading Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal our Trauma and Our World by Thomas Hübl and Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay by Anne Carson. Listening to this playlist for December.
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