Rooted, but I Flow

Though I had escaped internal harm from a terrible car crash last fall, while I was in the hospital an unexpected finding captured on black and white imaging required action.

I gave myself six months to heal from the crash before abdominal surgery. I thought that’d be a good amount of time to physically and mentally prepare, as best as I could, for another hospital stay. During that half a year, my last thought of the night before trying to fall asleep and a first thought when waking in the morning centered on when that time would be up.

It is through my experiences from crash date to surgery date and days thereafter that I saw life’s contradictions.

Virginia Woolf said in her book, The Waves, “I am rooted, but I flow.” Woolf wonders how we can be anchored and be changing at the same time. Rooting suggests stability, your identity, memories, and place. Flow, as the opposite refers to the passing of time, a developing identity, shifting emotions. Woolf believes both are true at the same time.

I thought about the contradiction: how we can feel rooted, solid, yet we continue to move—stable yet in motion.

As my surgery date neared, I’d glance daily at a calendar that hung on the fridge. I had written, “I can do this” on March 1 and 2, the day before and of surgery. As the days approached, there was something about making a declarative statement, one that I could read as an affirmation, a root, believing that everything would be okay, that I would be okay.

Yet, who was I kidding? My fear of the unknown grew like bruises (which I was sure to receive!) under the skin as each day passed, my emotions erupting just as colorful. It would be the flow I was about to meet like any good tide that asks no questions but demands surrender to it.

Though I still had lingering effects from the crash, I looked for healing through returning to the woods for long walks and to the yoga mat for mind meditation and body vitality. Days before the surgery, I would pat my belly, smooth and round from miles walked and yoga sessions practiced, noting how change to it was imminent. The pull of wanting things to stay just as they were and the push of getting it over with was a tug of war I could not reconcile.

I felt every hour of five days in the hospital after surgery, yet I had lost count of what day it was. Perhaps the view from the fourth floor of my hospital room was a factor. The weather remained consistent each day: heavy fog with occasional spitting rain. The blurriness of the view was reminiscent of a Renaissance painting. My mental and physical state felt like how a Leonardo DaVinci work appears.

Once home, I unplugged from all social media and writing projects in favor of self-care. I rerouted my hours, once allocated to my writerly self throughout the day, to places I hadn’t been to for a long time.

I read posts I had written here on Come Sit Awhile.

I read one particular essay, And Then There Were Two. I was prompted for feelings of days long ago. The writing sounded old, my bones creaking along with a rocking chair, but I was not old. I thought then that my age had simply afforded me more moments of the past to accrue, stocking them up in memory like a bank, making a withdrawal when a bit of well-being and comfort was needed.

In David Berner’s The Ritual of the Journal, pages in his journals are a mix of notations, a little of this and that, and once in a while an astounding thought. He’s got stacks of the small books, piled and safe-kept.

I thought of my stack of journals, books of hard-and soft-bound journals lined up on a shelf in a closet.

I am reminded of them when I open the door, a familiar sight I expect as they had been placed there decades ago and have since never been moved. I thought about how much space they took up. “Now what do I do with them?” I asked myself.

I took David’s advice. He suggested I read them, that there would be a nugget or two found. When I was writing my memoir over the years, I had pulled a journal or two for fact-checking, never taking the time to read entries in earnest. But this time, I read the entries.

Sure, the books took up needed shelf space, but the books held time. The space they took up, sitting dormant, was my young self in constant motion of trying to find my place in this world and who I was meant to be. My identity developed with each turned page and each newly opened journal, as I worked to stay grounded.

A grade school classmate recently contacted me to “save the date” for our fifty-year reunion. It was the bicentennial when the class of Holy Cross grade school graduated, celebrating in spirit and fun, just as we will do this fall.

The class of ‘76 grew up in a tight community of about 18,000 in Deerfield, Il where the center of town was marked by four corners. You could go to Kresge’s for just about anything: school supplies, a milkshake, a visit with the parakeets in the back of the store. It was the late sixties and into the seventies, and riding bikes into town and well into the sticky summer nights, led by the blinking fireflies like beacons, were memories created to last a lifetime.

I recalled my rootedness in my hometown, my neighborhood, and on Carlisle Avenue when growing up. I felt how much time had passed.

I thought about how life often places us in situations where opposing truths coexist—grief and joy, despair and resilience, loss and renewal. Annie Dillard often writes about beauty and fear existing at the same time—nature as awe-inspiring and indifferent. In Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese, there’s a sense of being lost, as well as joy—wild geese calling you back into the “family of things.”

It is not about choosing one side over the other, but about learning to live within the tension between them. And therein lies wisdom.

Self-discovery was evident over the past months, from crash to recovering from surgery.

I could be resilient and fragile at the same time.

I could feel grounded in my body, though it has and would go through many changes.

I could still hold on to the self despite my changing circumstances.

The tension between the contradictions is not something that calls to be resolved. Believing that a resolution is not needed, or even an explanation, the contradictions just need to be recognized.

Though I feared my writing skills and inspiration would become void over the weeks post-surgery, a quick glance at the shelves above my desk where three published books reminded me of the time that has passed and memories that had been made. I had been along for the ride and my footing in what I love to do hadn’t loosened. I still remained planted with every step, just as I do when traipsing through the woods of any forest.

I continue to flow.

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”– Diary entry, 1925

“No one ever quite leaves their childhood behind, no matter how grown-up they think they are.” – The House in Paris

Somerset Maugham. British Empire. Discord between classes. A look at human nature and its frailties.

SPRING!