Read an Excerpt
Why We Write: Searching for Beauty in an Imperfect World
Caesars
Head is a granite outcropping just over the North Carolina-South Carolina
border. Created by shifting tectonic plates and water erosion, the rock is
3,266 feet above sea level and rests on the southern edge of the Blue Ridge
Escarpment, the line at which the Blue Ridge Mountains gives way to the South
Carolina foothills. On a clear day, you can see three states from the top—North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Georgia. You can buy a map and trinkets at the visitor’s center. You can hike one of
the trails in Jones Gap State Park in the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area, a
13,000-acre forest.
What you may not do, at least legally, is enter the park at night. There are
too many obstacles to trip over, too many wild animals prowling about, too many
ways to, like the dog for whom the outcropping is allegedly named, go tumbling
off the mountain.
Nevertheless,
on a bitterly cold night in late November of 2016, a few weeks after the
election that handed Donald Trump the presidency, my three adult children and I
snuck past the signs warning visitors not to enter the park after hours. My
husband waited in the parked car, the headlights illuminating the parking lot as
the rest of us scaled the gate, then headed into the fog. Using the flashlights
on our cell phones, my kids and I navigated a short path, then emerged on the rock
face.
Fierce wind rolled up the mountain and stung our faces. To
get a full breath, we had to turn our backs to the wind. Huddled together, the
cold seeping through our gloves, we tucked our hands in each other’s elbows and
surveyed the forest below. It was dusk, just before sunset, and everything
below had a dull, grayish hue—the trees, the birds, the mountains. Normally,
this state park received about seventy-nine inches of rain annually, but this
fall had been one of the driest seasons of the century in our region, and now
forest fires raged across the region. In the waning daylight, we could see
pockets of smoke here and there, a bit of haze in that valley, a mountain over
there obscured by fog. The air smelled of campfires. The world was on fire,
both literally and metaphorically, and though I could not yet know exactly how
the next four years would play out, watching the blazes, I imagined the
devastation in the woods—the terrified animals, the century-old trees
exploding, the habitats destroyed, the stench of death—and I was filled with
foreboding.
Then, just as we gathered near the protective rail at the
rock’s edge, the sun slid behind a mountain below, leaving only fire and
shadow—reds and oranges and grays and deep blackness—a stunning display of
flickering light. One mountain to the west was backlit with flames, a cinematic
feat of nature. What had moments before struck me as tragic had been
transformed, and the scene was breathtaking, otherworldly, spectacular. What
should have been darkness was light, and what should have been light was
darkness, and in that moment, I no longer knew who or what or where I was, from
whence I had come or where I was going. Gazing at the blazing spectacle beneath
me, I was air—cold, smoky, fiery, permeable, one with the vast expanse before
me, part of the fire force that no longer felt malicious or destructive or a
purveyor of impending doom but simply was. Light in the midst of
darkness. Calm in the midst of chaos. Beauty even in destruction.
In his devastatingly beautiful book about the Vietnam War, The
Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes about this inherent contradiction
between beauty and destructive forces:
How do you generalize? War is hell, but that's not the half
of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and
discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty;
war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes
you dead. The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that
war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you
can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer
rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in
ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire
the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape
and proportion, the great sheets of metalfire streaming down from a gunship,
the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of
napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. It
fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a
killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid
or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a
powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about
this, though the truth is ugly. (77)
O’Brien’s exploration of truth stuns
me anew every time I read this passage. How does this knowledge of the moral
indifference of beauty inform our lives? How does this change how we move in
this world? Admittedly, beauty can be difficult to summon at times. In fact, as
I write this, during a raging pandemic, following four years of political and
social upheaval, just before the next election which will most certainly
determine fate of this country, it almost alludes me now. Searching for it, I
return again and again to the woods, and, again and again, in every season,
both literally and metaphorically, I find it there. In the spring, there are
trilliums and May apples and bluebirds and fawns. In the summer, gushing
waterfalls and baby bears and patches of wild huckleberries and blueberries and
blackberries. In the fall, acorns and chipmunks and buckeyes and brilliant fall
colors. And in the winter, profound silences and solitude and miles-long
vistas. Such exquisite abundance.
In
her 1942 memoir We Took to The Woods,
Louise Dickinson Rich writes about this power of nature to shift our gaze away
from the hardness of this world, to rock our metaphorical tectonic plates. In
the mid 1930’s, Rich moves with her husband to the backwoods of Maine. During
her stay there, Rich, who grew up “more or less a lady” (244), has no modern
conveniences—no running water, no plumbing, no electricity—and though summers
in Maine are mild and lovely, winters are brutal. Early in the book, Rich
describes the nightly trek to the outhouse: “This is no great hardship in the
summer, but in winter, with the snow knee deep, the wind howling like a maniac
up the river, and the thermometer crawling down to ten below zero, it is a
supreme test of fortitude to leave the warmth of the fire and go plunging out
into the cold, no matter how great the necessity” (17). Even for 1942, this is
a rough and rustic existence, a life well outside the mainstream, and thus the
pulse, the momentum, of this narrative becomes threefold: Why is Rich here? How
does she survive? And what lessons does she learn?
Rich, in fact, names the chapters
after questions people have asked her: “Don’t You Ever Get Bored?”, “Aren’t You
Ever Frightened?”, “Is It Worthwhile?”, etc., an interesting structural device
that demonstrates that she understands that her lifestyle is intriguing, even
suspect, to the average person. In moving to the woods, Rich has become an
“other,” a feminine Thoreau. Throughout the book, Rich refers to everywhere
other than the Maine wilderness as “The Outside” (p. 32, for example). The
Outside is always capitalized, as if it is the proper name of a place, and this
serves to remind readers that in Rich’s mind, there are really only two places,
her world and the rest of the world. However, Rich is no longer concerned with
The Outside. It is what she finds on The Inside (my term, not hers) that
interests her.
I
first read Rich’s book when a friend recommended it to me during our MFA
program. A few years earlier, following a series of financial missteps, my
husband and I had moved to a rundown, century-old cabin on fifty-three,
gorgeous, snake-infested wooded acres. Like Rich, I had grown up “more or less
a lady,” and the sudden shift from my previous complacent, comfortable life to
one that involved more mice catching and opossum baiting than I had previously
imagined possible left me reeling. During this time, Rich gave voice to my
experiences in a way I was still unable to do. As I struggled with feeling lonely
and isolated, I read about how Rich embraced the challenges of a life spent
living close to nature. For Rich, hardship and beauty were one and the same,
interwoven and intertwined, changing the narrator in myriad subtle ways.
Describing
a winter day, Rich writes, “It was warm and sunny, and the ground was covered
with a light fluff of snow, which was blue in the shadows, and gold in the sun,
and faint rose and purple on the distant hills” (137). The rich array of
colors—blue, gold, rose, and purple—paint a vivid picture of a dynamic and
lovely landscape. Again, later on, Rich describes a spot on the river beneath
her home: “The river is deep blue and crisping white, and the cut ends of the
pulp are like raw gold in the sun. All the senses come alive, even that strange
rare sense that tells you, half a dozen times between birth and death—if you
are lucky—that right now, right in this spot, you have fallen into the pattern
of the universe” (201). This sort of intensified sensory experience, this hyperawareness
of sound and color, happens, in part, not in spite of the isolation in nature,
but because of it. Her transformation
comes when she is no longer of The
Outside, and this change is gentle and understated, visible mainly through her
quiet reflections on nature. “Looking back through the telescope of the last
six years,” Rich says, “I can see myself as I was and realize how living here
has changed me. I hope it has changed me for the better” (319). Rich’s life in
the wilderness is one fraught with the challenges, but it is also a lively,
evocative testament to the transformative power of nature, one that is as
intriguing as it is instructive. How did we learn to live our best lives? In
what ways might we better meet the challenges of this moment? How and where
might we find beauty during these unpredictable and fiery times?
These
are questions I have pondered long and often since last March when the COVID
lockdowns began. In many ways, my family has been lucky during this
metaphorical dead of winter. My husband and I have kept our jobs, and though
our three adult children have suffered job losses and setbacks, we have all
been healthy, and we have enjoyed many hours together we would not have
otherwise. We have gone hiking and running. We have hosted family and friends
for socially distant gatherings outside. We have read books and watched all six
seasons of Schitt’s Creek and held, in our living room, a makeshift
Banff Film Festival, complete with outdoors adventure films and nature-y snacks
and free giveaways (Here, take this Cliff bar and these Smartwool socks I
never wear!). We have done more Peloton yoga sessions that I care to admit.
Some evenings, we have lingered for hours over a simple meal, soup and homemade
bread and wine.
Life
has not been the same, and we have been constantly aware of the grief of others
and the chaos happening in the outside world. Still, for us, out in this wooded
hollow, we have existed on the Inside, so to speak, not untouched or unmoved
but aware of our relatively good fortune, and it is in this quietness and
familial solitude that I have begun to be aware of my own heightened sensory
experiences. The thrum of a hummingbird’s wings as I sit on the patio. The gush
of the waterfall just after a storm. The first, hoarse crows of our rooster.
The shift in the pitch as my hound dog bays first at a white squirrel and then
at a deer and then—oh, my!—at a bear passing through.
Nature
has taught me this. The woods have taught me this. Of course, the idea that
communing with nature is good for the writerly mind is not a new idea, but it
is a good one and worth repeating. In the wilderness, we find solitude. In
solitude, we encounter the full breadth of human experience—death and
destruction and hope and despair and beauty and ugliness, all of it at once—and
therein lies the essence of a life fully lived and a story fully expressed. If
you sit long enough and still enough and quietly enough, something beautiful
will find you.
On
November 13, 2016, five days after the election and a week or so before our
family adventure at Caesars Head, my husband and I headed to Asheville to see
Mavis Staples perform at The Orange Peel downtown. Smoke and haze hung in the
air, and as the implications of the election began to sink in, we were
increasingly despondent, both about the fires and about the undoing of our
country as we had known it, or, perhaps, as we had imagined it to be. As we
left the parking garage and made our way up Biltmore Avenue, dread clung to my
hair, my clothes. Everywhere I turned, I smelled the cloying, acrid scent.
Inside The Orange Peel, I ordered a beer and stood in the back near the bar.
“I
don’t know how long it’ll last,” Mavis said to the audience, “but we’re gonna
make you feel good now.”
And
she was right. I had seen Mavis perform a couple of times before, and she had
always been spectacular, but that night, she was on fire. In a performance that
was more tent revival than concert, more sermon than song, Mavis was powerful,
majestic, true. You’re not alone, she sang. You’re not alone. And
over a thousand hippies and used-to-be hippies and hippie wannabes raised their
glasses and drank and cried and cheered and sang and drank some more. Through
her songs, Mavis gave voice to our collective sorrow, and something about her
performance caught me by surprise, as if I had, in the five days prior,
forgotten that such beauty existed. Even still, when I think of that time, of
the fires, the election, the growing sense of despair, I think of it in tandem
with that moment, of the way Mavis saw our pain, absorbed it, validated it,
then sent it hurling back to us in great, compassionate waves. We were not
prepared to go there, but she took us there anyway, and we loved her for it,
loved that she believed in beauty when we no longer did.
Since
that night when Mavis sang to a grieving, sold-out crowd about the change we
have yet to see, I have had to work extra hard to root down, to seek beauty
more and more often. Some days, I don’t see it at all, except in hindsight. Oh,
look back there, I say to myself days or weeks or months after the fact. Look
at that beautiful, moss-covered rock that was there all along. Look how the
snapping turtles swim along the dock looking for handouts. Look at the red eft
crossing the gravel road. See how amazing and strong he is, how determined.
Perhaps it is like a bit like training a hound puppy to sniff
out a bear. I personally do not hunt bears, but I do have a couple of hound
dogs, and they have the attention span of a flea, so I would imagine that it
takes a bit of work to keep them on task. No, not the squirrel. No, not the
bunny or the snail or the pile of ants. Yes, that. The big, smelly thing. Good
boy. Perhaps, if I practice regularly, I can train myself to sniff out
beauty more often. Perhaps if I can learn to appreciate beauty more often, I
will begin to believe there are beautiful things I cannot yet see. Perhaps if I
believe in beautiful things I cannot yet see, I might even be able to will them
into being. Poet Ross Gay discusses a similar phenomenon in his book of brief,
poetic essays titled The Book of Delights. For most days over the course
of a year, Gay wrote about one simple thing that delighted him—a praying
mantis, an odd turn of phrase, garden fresh carrots, an airport encounter with
a stranger, Mitch McConnell’s smile/frown, of “someone whose penis is in a
vise” (125). In writing these essays, Gay suddenly finds his life to be, well,
more delightful. In conjuring a thing, in tending it and cultivating it, his
delight radar had grown more precise or perhaps larger, more encompassing.
When
my thirty-one-year-old daughter, who had lost her job in Costa Rica due to
COVID and had temporarily moved home, first told me about Gay’s book, we
debated at length over the distinction between joy and delight. Then, once we
had agreed on a definition—joy refers more to a state of mind, we decided,
where delight implies transience and surprise—we made it our habit to name a
special delight we encountered each day. Some days were tough. In our small,
quarantine bubble, each day felt much the same as the one before. More than
once, when we came up empty at the end of the day, we even stayed up late just
to see if something else might happen. Maybe the cat would curl up in the empty
Hoka box that had been sitting on the coffee table for weeks. Maybe we would
get a shoutout from one of the Peloton instructors. Maybe one of us would save
the other one the last few bites of Jeni’s Gooey Butter Cake ice cream. Maybe
the sixteen-year-old dog who shared our quarantine quarters wouldn’t poop in
her bed at exactly 10 p.m. that night.
Eventually,
we realized we had it all backwards. Whereas we were staying up late waiting
for a delight to run us down like a linebacker, we soon found a better
approach. We learned that in order to rack up our tally of delights, we had to
start early, so we woke up looking for our delight, and we did not let up until
we had found something. My special coffee mug was actually clean. Butterflies
flew in my daughter’s shadow when she was running. A bear walked across the
road in front of me on my way home from the store one day. Our new crested hen,
Moira, laid her first egg (and, there, another delight, Schitt’s Creek!).
Before long, it was all we could talk about—this delightful thing, that
delightful thing. It became a sort of competition, who could find one first,
who was more delighted.
“You
know,” my friend Karen said when I told her what we were doing, “what you have
found is a spiritual practice.”
But,
ever the religious skeptic, I was hesitant to label it as such.
“No,”
I said. “No way.”
But
Karen, who is a poet and knows much more about such things than I do, insisted
that naming delight is a form of gratitude, which is, or so she says, akin to
prayer. I suppose, then that, using her reasoning, searching for beauty in the
midst of mayhem, or at least being open to receiving it, is a form of prayer as
well.
In
the darkest, most hopeless moments of this past year, while I have sniffed out
tiny delights to stave off despair, I have thought often of O’Brien’s words, of
artillery fire and cancer under the microscope and of savage, breathtaking
wildfires charring great swaths of land. Before the 2016 drought was over, twenty
wildfires had burned close to 60,000 acres of western North Carolina forest
land, a fact that amazes me even now as I ponder the devastation this pandemic
has leashed on our world—all the lives lost, all the people trying to rebuild
their lives in the midst of COVID, all the people whose lives can never be
fully rebuilt. I do not find meaning
in this destruction. I would not go that far. I see no silver lining, no
lemonade to be made of lemons, whatever metaphor you want to use. But there are
moments of staggering beauty in the midst of so much pain, and in those moments
when life is hardest, I have come to believe that beauty and grace exist side
by side, that in one, we find the other, beauty with grace, grace with beauty.
Still, when I consider how
to move forward, I am often overwhelmed. Where do I begin? Where do we
begin?
For
me, as for Rich, the answer lies in the woods and on the page, where mystery
and certainty, desolation and beauty live in harmony, where scorched forest
floors give way to hillsides full of lady slippers, and wildfires morph into
brilliant psychedelic displays. I may not be able to fix a single thing, to
ease anyone’s grief or abate anyone’s fears, but perhaps if I keep showing up
and doing the work of writing my truth on this page, you will see that you are
no longer alone, and then you will write something I will read, and I will see
that I am no longer alone. The destruction will not be less, you see. But we
will be beautiful in spite of it.
