Mudgy

Delightful, Beloved.

There are certain privileges, I think, that come with living in my new place. I certainly get to do, and especially say things that others who live in my old and more genteel neighborhood cannot do or say. I can now offer opinions and thoughts that would have gotten me uninvited from old neighborhood’s  Superbowl™ parties because who needs somebody bringing all that  “let me explain something” energy and trying to convince the other guests who are just trying to watch the commercials and trying to find the T.S. easter eggs and trying to keep track of who won the half-time share of the pool - that he has had some sort of epiphany -  especially while he just keeps eating shrimp after shrimp after shrimp? Who needs that? Seriously. Who?

There are fewer niceties in my new neighborhood’s Superbowl™ parties. Fewer guardrails. People tend to care less about T.S. and T.K. and nobody is really keeping track of how many shrimps anyone else eats or how many glasses of wine others leave on the coffee table. There’s not even a pool for people to bet on the score. And the guests tend to recognize that when someone starts man-splaining, it’s likely more awkward curiosity than hubris, and maybe  even an invitation for others to come take a peek at the world through his lens - in a desperate hope that somebody else might see what he sees, and maybe that will be enough to convince him that he is not quite alone, or mad. 

The parties in my new neighborhood can, and frequently do, wander out of control, and the house is generally an impressive mess - with a lot of spilled wine -  by the time the two-minute warning, inevitably, gets the guests’ attention and they start looking for their coats.  

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I didn’t move to this particular neighborhood on my own accord. But it’s not like I was evicted from the genteel neighborhood either. I  simply woke up one morning in a new bed in a new house on a new street. And as far as I can tell, it wasn’t for anything I said, or for anything I did. It was just because.

 Joan Didion’s first lines in The Year of Magical Thinking were:

Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Joan is legend here in my new neighborhood. I’m told she lived a couple of doors down from my place, and I believe it. She describes a lot of the things I have noticed on my morning walks: the cracked sidewalks, the unraked leaves in the otherwise tidy yards, the daffodils waking before the end of January, the blousy purple peonies, the chickadees announcing how they made it through the cold night to anyone who can hear.  They even renamed the neighborhood in Joan’s honor: Mudgy.

The one question that risks getting you kicked out of Superbowl™ parties in Mudgy is why? There are no satisfactory answers to that question, or at least no answers that can be held in the space of a human head. Not that why is a bad question in the old town, but here it’s the Valdemort of questions; the trail that leads to the abyss and the residents of Mudgy just know it.  None of them wants to walk back into the abyss.

Don’t ask why.

But aside from that -  pretty much any honest question, any honest conjecture, any honest exploration is fair game in Mudgy. I didn’t move here by choice, but I don’t think I want to go back to my old neighborhood. It was safer there. People lived longer and the rules of grammar were clearer, but I don’t think safer is, or has ever been the point. Sometimes you have to be dragged away from a place to know where you really were. Some things cannot be truly and fully seen from the inside. 

(Maybe someday I will write the same thing about Mudgy. Maybe knowing that is the point.)

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Yesterday I came across a Rumi poem and thought of you: 

THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO

There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It's a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.

You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle." Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that. You say, "But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give yourself to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and forgetting your dignity and purpose.

I know you’re too young to understand this fully today. I am also too young to understand this fully today. And yet, I am believing Rumi knew that you, that you specifically, delightful one, have been given the gift of a particular way of loving that you, and only you can love. Your work is to love in that way. Fully and without fear. And if you do not, if you love as others insist you ought to love and ignore the voice of the one who already owns your breath and moments, then you have denied that gift to a world that longs for it. But if you do love as only you can, then you definitely have done your task, and have been a good and faithful servant. You will have remembered your dignity.

Someday this will make more sense to you than it does now. Someday when Ms. Kristen, your teacher, is all but forgotten and you know about fallacies and tautologies and physics and the maths, Rumi will begin to come into clearer focus. It’s a paradox. The deepest truths normally are.

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And when it happens, I want you to have a tiny mirror to keep with you when you need to a glimpse of how another saw you before you wandered down all the branches of yourself. Before you discovered jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and the rest. Before you discovered your shame. Maybe seeing how another saw you will help you to continue your particular work:

You were picking wildflowers

You were picking wildflowers at the farm before you were two,
And the first word I heard you say clearly was Nevermore.

You loved Spider-Gwen.
You were both frightened by, and curious about the Marley brother who emerged from Scrooge’s door knocker.

Your teacher, after your first week of school when we happened to be visiting, couldn’t stop saying how much she loved you,  
while your sisters waited patiently in the classroom.
Every girl, you said, was your sister. 

On the way home and told your dad you had napped when you had not napped. No way.
On the way home you wore a paper groundhog hat over your blonde curls and when we got home you gave it to your sister who, you said, was having a hard day.
You were excited to eat pizza and watch Panyo again for the very first time.

The next day at the zoo, you fought to stay and play on the park swings, even when there were wolves and a black bear and snow foxes to be seen., 
You preferred the bat cave to the flamingos pools.
You seemed to love the snap-snake who you named Emma, 
Especially when she clung to your leg.

You have been, at times, painfully shy,
Yet once, I saw you throw your arms around the leg of a gentle mountain man 
you had never met before,
and I saw him lose his words while you melted his brain with your three-year-old hug. 

You were picking wildflower at the farm before you were two,
And the first word I heard you say clearly was Nevermore.
(Seriously.)

And this is why Mudgy suits me. In my old neighborhood, Rumi was on the edge of the edge. Advice given was clear and direct and (almost always) resented. I could not have sent you this letter from my safe and genteel town. But here things are a little different, and I can offer these little glimpses of you, to you, and hope with all of my heart that someday you will know just what to make of them, even before you find yourself in Mudgy.

I think you will, and it will be spectacular, and you will still be delightful, evermore.

Oremus,

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