Truth from the ballpit.

Sometimes, I write things that demand to be written. They are words and phrases and thoughts that come unbidden. They rise with the sun over the garden. They wake me in the night and pound behind my eyes until I scribble them with the force of a pressure valve into the notebook beside my bed. These thoughts are aggressive, they are passionate and unyielding.

Sometimes, they are more elusive. They hint at themselves when I am focusing on another deadline. They come fleetingly while I drive, or in a brief moment while I’m listening to someone else speak, or reading what someone else wrote. Those thoughts have to be captured. They have to be lured like the slick body of a rainbow trout that flashes in the sunshine as he breaks the water’s surface on my line.

These thoughts are sometimes formless things. They are wisps of knowing, and sometimes I do not know how to write them down. I can catch them like fireflies and put them in a jar and study them, but they don’t blink much in captivity. They expire quickly.

Sometimes, I don’t write anything at all. Times like now, when my thoughts are massive and many. My brain feels like the ball pit at the indoor playground where I used to take my boys. They’d beg me to jump in with them, and I would, my senses overloaded by the feeling of being bumped and touched all over, the smells of bodies and the weight of mysteries that could be buried all around me. I hated the ball pit. I hated it as a child and as a mother, and I hate when my mind is full of bumping, bumbling brain matter, undulating with all the things hidden inside it.

A few days ago, a Substack post by Ashley Adamant of Practical Self Reliance popped up on my feed. It was called “Substacks with a Sense of Place”. The title grabbed me. Wendell Berry fan that I am, I myself long for a sense of place. It doesn’t come naturally to me to feel like I belong. I’ve spent a great deal of energy in my life attempting to cultivate it, but that feeling, I’m afraid, falls into the elusive category.

I started reading the article and quickly found myself invested. She described a type of writing, “writing with roots”, she called it. “Yes!” I thought. This is what I want to write! This is what I want to be! I, the garden girl who loves the land, am lost in my ball pit brain. I haven’t written a thing in weeks.

Every time I try, the first words that come out are “I am so angry”, so I throw that ball back.
“We can’t vote our way out”, throw it back.
“I feel hopeless.” Throw it back.
“I’ve spent over a decade telling people to prepare, and I don’t know what to say now because I’m afraid it may be too late”. Throw it back.

I have spent my whole life as an optimist. My family called me Pollyanna when I was a kid. As an adult, if asked, my cup was half full or half empty, I’d say “halfway to overflowing”. But lately, that hope hasn’t felt like the Superman suit it used to. Lately, I’ve been feeling like one of those inflatable clown punching bags weighted with sand at the bottom. The harder the blow, the more velocity I have to stand back up, all the readier to take the next punch.

I don’t talk about this stuff because it makes people think I need a pep talk, and I don’t. This is just another state of my mind. I take it to the garden and weep it into the soil. I find strings of Truth, weave them into a rope, and pull myself out of the overwhelm. I go very still. I have always found that when I’m being bumped from all sides, an internal stillness can rise and cause everything around me to rest, too. Eventually. If I wait long enough.

But silence is tricky, huh? Time is hard to give when you’ve convinced yourself of the obligation. Writing is an effective way to release the pressure or capture the firefly, but sometimes when the thoughts I am truthfully thinking are too hard, require too much vulnerability, demand too much of me, or threaten to challenge my reader too much for them to stay, I push them down. Again and again until they are drowning me, and I haven’t said a word to you in a month.

When I was reading Ashley’s post, which was moving me deeply and making me clearly see what I want to hopefully someday be, I was completely caught off guard to see my own name and my own writing on her list of recommendations that embodied what she was describing. There, among multiple writers I love and am inspired by, I saw myself. That’s the problem with the ballpit. It blinds you to your own body.

I don’t have this sorted yet. This isn’t the tidy triumph from some tidy place. It’s a missive from the middle. It’s the truth from the girl buried in the balls.

Here they are. The things I haven’t said. I need to say them, jumbled and bumbling, I need to clear them out so I can see my own hands.

I do not think it is too late to prepare. I do think it is too late to prepare casually. I do think that if the alarm started ringing with time to wake up, wash your hair, pour your coffee, and piddle in the garden, to microwave the mug and finish it before you have to get ready to leave for an appointment, we have now reached the point that snooze has been hit five times and there is no longer time to piddle. I think the hopelessness comes from self-protection. It’s easier for me to say it’s too late than to say it’s more needed than ever, but also more costly. It’s easier for me to throw my hands up and be quiet than to keep speaking and absorb the fear that responds.

I’m angry. I don’t know exactly why yet. I can’t tell if it’s a righteous table-flipping anger at the gross injustice I see. Because that would be valid, right? But, it may be self-protection, too. There is a raging version of me that exists in a state of fury somewhere in my middle. Her face is red and her fists are balled and every single time I see another thing — about men devouring the innocence of children and bombs being dropped on humans and money being spent in numbers that I cannot fathom to further the agendas of the people who have it to spend, but instead spend my meager tax dollars — that angry version of me flails. I am so angry at the injustice of this current time that I have spent more moments than I care to admit allowing my own tiny fists to raise at my God and demand, “WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?”

And God. God is in the ballpit. My faith is in the ballpit but it isn’t what people expect. It doesn’t quote verses and nod gently. I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere in the table-flipping anger. It’s in the urgency and also the peace that undergirds it. My faith has cost me everything. It has anchored me like the sand in the bottom of the clown punching bag. My stupid faith sends me hurling back upright when all my self-protection begs for me to be able to stay down. To grovel.

I am furious with my faith, but I’m held by it. I AM it. It would be easier to live in such a time as this if I had the capacity to be numb, but I’ll be damned if I don’t feel every. single. ball. in this pit. And I want to call this place Godforsaken, but that would go against everything I know to be true.

This world is not Godforsaken, because we are in it. We, with our cups halfway to overflowing. We, with our pockets full of seeds and the sheer determination to make something beautiful grow, to spread a table with a feast in a culture that poisons people with processed food and poisons the earth to grow it.

We are enormous, darling. We are terrifying in our power and infinite in our capability. I mean it. I know it. And when I am willing to not bury myself in all the things I am afraid will rob me of belonging, I can shout it and embody it and see it spread. This is our time. It is our place. We are rooted and born for such a time as this.

Don’t you see? The world did not come to a crescendo of corruption all at once. It is an orchestration that has been held for a very long time. It’s why I cannot agree with the homesteading mentality that we are returning to “the good old days”. Sure, maybe some things were good, but not for everyone. There was still oppression and bondage. There was still hopelessness and toil.

Enormous, darling. Angry and fierce and passionate, but ultimately driven by a hope that refuses to let us stay down.