floral reprieve

20 March 2023

On a beach beneath the cliffs of some small, obscure township, a curly-haired overalled person will fill half a dozen feed buckets with Irish Sea water in a futile attempt to make salt. She will dip the ultimate bucket into the water and struggle to pull it from the tide. Many ambitious projects are foolish enough to warrant no one’s sympathy, but she is not looking for sympathy. The passing of time sometimes leaves a space where nothing really exists—a space where the absence of all things is felt and the presence of them, too. Thus, one must remain in motion in order to survive the unfolding chaos that saturates all.

The curly-haired American person will load that last bucket into the back of a rusty pickup truck or maybe a used station wagon. She will close the tailgate or the trunk and will turn back towards a sun hanging an hour-margin above inky waters. There is an illusion of stillness in the sun, but it will surely sink below the shifting currents again. Maybe the sight of it will overwhelm our dear humble character, and she will take a picture of it on her phone before setting off toward home which we can almost most surely assume will be a dusty renovation project in the middle of nowhere. It will be an hour from the seaside.

Close to home, the stars will sear a darkening sky, and our dear humble narrator will look up at them in what might be an unusually clear sky. Something about it will trigger the memory of sitting on the floor of an apartment in downtown Salt Lake City, but the connection between the twinkling stars and that place with those people will not come to mind. Maybe in a night to come, when the stars appear again, I will imagine the smallest astronaut roaming the (strangely) neatly raked red sands of Mars.

I will carry into this new home the containers of salt water, and it will feel quicker than the seaside retrieval and far more tiring. I will labor to occupy my mind in the empty space between here and there, especially in the event that someone comes to visit. I will vibrate with the anticipation of meeting someone I know again for the first time, and it is when I open the door after hearing a knock that I will remember I am miles away from home.

I confess this is an attempt to explain to you the tension I feel in social impact work. This projection into a future that does not exist, but could shakes my soul because how can I tell you what it feels like to have been loved, to be loved, by so many with a depth that I can only describe as healing. The weight of it alone will crush me a thousand times, but it turns on itself and is converted. Cherished memories held in one hand and the inevitable decay of a life previously known thrusts me forward like a beam of light across a dark universe.

When I open the door for you, my dear friends, in whatever place I live, there will be remnants of all time as it accumulates for me. I will make my own countertop fermented elderberry soda, because I miss Utah, but I will also tell you about my neighbors and the community I belong to. I will show you the houseplants I brought over and the garden I started, and your photos will appear alongside new ones on the walls of my home, photo albums, and digital timelines. I hope to sit in thirteen highbacked wood chairs around a wooden table that I thrifted or my dad lovingly (and begrudgingly) made for me. Like pillars, we’ll sit and eat and catch up, and I will feel so full that I internally burst.

I will chase that high forever, and I will find as many people as I can to have around my proverbial dinner table. In the chaos that will be my future house renovation, irresolvable mistakes in my personal life, failure and bust in my professional advocacy work, and not feeling strong enough to advocate for those I love, I will find the “simple alignment” among the pillars.

We were leaning over the world’s edge, and we did not fall.

Eventually, the night will end, and you, my fellows, will go back home, too. Going back to the seaside, seeing the stars, seasoning with salt, something will remind me of you, again, but the story that was there will be lost. So I will write a new one, and I will call it “love”. I leave you with this story of regeneration.