Looking straight at everything

The aliveness found in being with all of it

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A song I’m loving:

Coming and going, on 35mm film

Yesterday, my family and I escaped the heat early by heading to the Botanical Gardens in San Francisco — a beloved, beautiful place to wander for hours, with the bonus of the cool bite of bayside city air. I was immersed in the floral and fauna, the shade of the redwood grove, the delight of my daughter running through fields of grass, the sensory respite I often find in places void of things to buy or consume or share or do. It felt like an escape from more than just heat; it felt like an escape from the everyday-ness of life, from the things that bog down the mind and wear on the spirit.

On the drive home, we saw black smoke swirling from one side of the 101 to the other ahead of us, a car ignited on fire and spinning from the left lane to the right. By the time we reached it, the car was up in thick burnt orange flames, the driver and possibly others still in it, clearly gone. A lump lodged in my throat and I held back tears as I looked out the window, my daughter sleeping in her carseat, us safely driving home after a sweet and nourishing morning while someone else’s world came to a close, while someone else’s life was quite literally up in flames. The everyday-ness returned. Turns out it can’t be escaped, really. I looked right at it.

Scenes from the escape

As much as I want to believe there is an escape, a way out, a door or pill or product or meditation or achievement or numbing agent that will remove me from facing what asks to be faced over and over again, from being with reality, there simply isn’t. I find this to be true when I sit down to a blank page, desperate for it to be easier. I find this to be true when I look for ways out of feeling things I don’t want to feel: the scrolling or the filling of online shopping carts with things I don’t actually buy or the eating of food when I’m not really hungry. I find this to be true when I want to turn a sweet morning into proof everything is suddenly different, or better, or beyond the everyday. And none of these things are bad, wrong, something to criticize… they are simply things to notice, take stock of, cultivate an understanding around so I can soften the blow when I remember escaping temporarily doesn’t absolve me of facing the reality of returning to the heat, of living as a human being.

I remember the versions of me that were constantly desperate to leave the moment, leave my body, leave aliveness altogether. I remember sitting in my car on the side of the road in Santa Cruz, trying to will the courage to leave while something in me kept me from doing it. I remember being fourteen, sitting on the bathroom floor of my parent’s house with an emptying bottle of Tylenol. I remember walking alone late at night from MacArthur Bart Station in Oakland to my boyfriend at the time’s co-op, not a care in the world if something happened to me or not. I remember acid trips as an 18 year old that weren’t about finding deeper meaning but about disappearing. I remember so many moments of feeling the urgency to escape. It at times felt like agony to simply be here, in the mess of living: to see the pain within myself and others as something to learn how to be with, tend to, listen to. I couldn’t bare it. I still can’t sometimes; I still occasionally feel the desire to crawl out of my skin and find somewhere to go where the muck, the mess, the madness, the mourning magically disappears.

When we passed that car up in flames, my husband said, “You might want to look away.” “Why?” I asked. “You might see something bad,” he replied. I couldn’t help but be both frustrated by and grateful for my willingness to look — for all the work I’ve done to be able to simply face what is real, what is true, what is happening, without always needing to shield myself from it — for the parts of me who refuse to ignore what is painful, even when the pain sears and singes my throat as the lump forms.

Coastal quail, 35mm film

“Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad.”
―Henry Miller

Sometimes, we have to look away. Looking away at times means protecting our hearts. It at times means creating just enough room to keep going. It at times allows us to recalibrate, recenter, return to ourselves so as to not get swept away by all we must face. Looking away — knowing we can when we need to — is perhaps one of the only ways we’re able to keep looking. Knowing there’s small routes of temporary escape is perhaps a tool we can utilize as we learn how to fully be where we are.

Yet with that said, after decades of needing to look away from myself and the world more often than not in order to simply live, I now know I feel most alive when I look straight at everything. When I look as deeply at the California native plants growing in the garden as I do at the car up in flames. When I see something profoundly aching or beautiful and I choose to really see it, really let it affect me, really let it move me. I want to be affected. I want to be moved.

This is the kind of aliveness I want: the kind in which I trust myself enough to really look, and fully be with whatever it is I may find. The kind in which I know when I have the capacity to look and when I might need to turn away. The kind in which being with reality might feel painful, but ignoring it more so. The kind in which I’m not afraid to feel afraid, or grief-stricken, or angry. The kind in which an escape isn’t so quickly required. The kind in which I can hold both a joyful morning and a horrific moment in the same palm, letting them each remind me I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

△ How the Barbie movie merch undermines the Barbie movie script, from

Jessica DeFino

△ This gorgeous conversation on Thresholds with Ross Gay

△ The next book in my library queue

△ How to make your home and workspace fuel your creativity

△ Always screaming for more

△ The golden hour I chased after dinner last night, a way of recalibrating, re-centering, remembering how to hold all of it.

With care,
Lisa