“In everything there is a share of everything.”—Anaxagoras, Greek Philosopher (500-428 BC)

1. Inside/Outside

          A slipknot must grip, hold, restrain, and keep. Yet must yield. Like my body, the knot redefines itself by what it holds within its circumference and what surrounds it. At a writing workshop we take a walk, like monks might walk, hands in our pockets or behind our backs, focusing on our bodies’ inner monologues—footfalls, breath and pulse. But my hair blows into my face and tickles. My undoing. What is blowing hair? Is it my body or the wind? Inside or outside a circumference of sensation? Or the being that my body and the wind make—neither me nor wind, but both of us?
          Recently, Kate, a psychotherapy client, came in to speak about the loss of her beloved aunt. She grew up one of seven children in household cacophony—urgent bangs on the door of a sole bathroom, the kitchen telephone ringing, multiple arguments over who ate the last of the cereal, or used Mary’s clean towel, lost some shoes, stole some shoes, cut their thumb on a can of tuna and bled on their socks. She reminisced about how she visited her childless Aunt Greta and Uncle Bob for a week each summer.
          Her aunt’s favorite, Kate enjoyed a new pair of shorts and shirt, ice cream sundaes, trips to the beach. At her aunt’s house everything happened quietly, so quietly that quiet seemed like a sound itself. One afternoon, over sips of afternoon tea, Kate panicked, heard something unusual, unfamiliar. She kept asking her aunt and uncle, “What is that sound? What is that sound?” Like a rush of beating wings against the window. And suddenly, at ten, she realized it was coming from her own body: the sound of her own heart beating. The sound of her own breath, incoming and outgoing. Was it any accident she became a nurse? Listening by stethoscope to the precious sounds of a premature baby’s heartbeat and monitoring such hopeful respirations? She thought to tell me because she had just returned from flying south to see her aunt for the last time.
          Kate sat in a well-furnished hospice room, large windows letting in plenty of light, rhododendrons pinking the view. She held Aunt Greta’s hand, gently massaging the delicate skin—nearly translucent as a window pane–until she felt only her own pulse when Aunt Greta’s had gone.
          I know what it’s like to hide in the background or feel relegated to it, as if slipping down a rope whose end hovers at the edge of an abyss. Seamlessly, the gestalt of aging grays me into the invisible, or I play a character that frames the center-stagers. In that quiet, like the quiet of young Kate, the solo niece at Aunt Greta’s house, outside the bang and clatter of her striving and yearning siblings, I hear my heartbeats. But, unlike Kate, I register their countdown.
          As a psychotherapist, I too, like Kate, take the measure of what moves others or slows them down. I help re-story an anticipation, an upcoming worry, or loosen a paralyzing knot.

*****

          On our workshop stroll, I take a peek at the brick walkway, made of clay. Red clay in Hebrew is “adamah,” and blood is the same word. “Adamah.” I named my son, Adam, blood of the earth, untied from the umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck. Clay, like blood, has platelets. Coagulates and runs. Today, ice-melt seeps between the bricks and downhill, just as my nose begins to run. My nasal tissues, like the crusty mounds of snow, release their water substrates in this January thaw. Simply by laws of atmosphere, my body and the body of snowpack, slip in tandem from the knot of temporary solidity to fluidity, unconsciously and without intention.
          Air comes into my lungs, expanding every part of me, moving my blood. Breathing, like hair blowing in my face, embraces; marries forces. For a moment I cannot separate what exists inside and outside the exit doors of my body or my consciousness. Like blowing-hair—if, instead of a linear read, I mash descriptor and the object it modifies into one thought, one experience–so many of our best moments have as their catalyst that metaphor driven engine: the clang, cling, friction, poison, or love-making between two juxtaposed words–and worlds–each word from a distinct country of meanings. Each word firing up a redefinition of itself and the other. Take any two words– shovel corn, whisper fish, dredge heart, clench finder—and watch the way they roll around in your mind like marbles or billiard balls, falling into pockets, slipping under furniture or smashing each other into previously unanticipated rarities, articles of ridiculousness, brilliant, nonsensical, or poetic, but migrants, now outside their previous originations in which each word, each thought, each feeling tone made sense a moment before.
          I love slipping out of making sense into something startling, as when I ran barefoot, in vernal pools as a child. Early March. Ice lingered at the edges of hummocks, the long uncut grasses bent at their centers. A few frozen apples still hung brown and fermented on the orchard trees in the neighbor’s yard, drawing the hungry white tailed deer from their campsites among the thick conifers, and getting them drunk.
          “Craziness,” my mother yelled when I handed her my wet socks and boots. I didn’t know how to dispute her. To say, “Poetry” or “Awe.”

2. Weight

          Weight matters to a slip knot. This is the hanging knot. Whatever strains against it pulls it tighter. This knot will kill. And yet, so delicately and easily undone, a double slip knot ties a shoe, and often, inconveniently while walking, succumbs to the slightest movements of jeans against it. And falls slack.
          Slip knots hold sailors’ riggings, and mark the origins of the long-yarned arts of knitting and crocheting, to bring together a fabric of love, warmth, and celebration. And yet by a single pull of the working end, lines in its development disappear as do lines written on a page mistakenly erased; as do thoughts slip from memory by pulls of distraction—a kettle boiling, the chilling slant of winter sun through the southern facing window, an urgent phone call.
          I’ve almost hung myself with words, numerous times, but recently I struggled not to, on a Friday night, as Stephen walked into the house, having called me from the driveway. I’d asked that he call from his office when he left an hour and a half earlier so I wouldn’t have to rush into the shower or to prepare dinner.
          When he said, “Telling you when I left the office would have made the trip home feel longer,” I focused on how we keep each other from fatal falls off the precipitous edges of our griefs, failures, and disappointments. How we’re connected by this single, fragile, yet life affirming rope.

*****

          I’ve sobbed at the untied end of many tragedies. Once, after a first session, Raymond, who came to me for help, took his own life a few days later, though he had made a second appointment. His mother, Ellen, found him hanging from the doorway to her basement room, his feet hanging below the second downward stair. He had stayed there on a temporary basis following his divorce, his loss of a driver’s license, and between jobs. He had four children, and a potential good job upcoming. Ellen told me he’d put a pizza in the oven and she found it still baking after she had called 911.
          I wondered at the sad absurdity. How Raymond had planned to eat lunch, and somehow, distracted by self-torment, had put his head through a slip knot noose and ended everything, the pizza still cooking as if another meal, another afternoon, another day seemed possible an hour before.
          I have to confess I felt his fragility the first time we met. His pallor had me worried. Suicide seemed improbable given the four children, but still a possibility. I’d let the mark in my calendar lull me. That future date. As he had lulled himself with the hot and savory scent of pizza gathering its flavors at 425 degrees.
          Several years later, Ellen came for a few sessions. She told me how he could have placed his feet on either of the first two steps going down, if he had changed his mind. How pizza will always smell like death. How she almost didn’t go out that day.
          Like any parent who has lost a child, Ellen held a surfeit of love that should have occasioned one more smile, another loving touch, one more word of encouragement, and one more act of unimaginable power and grace that would have saved her child’s life. This reservoir of love remains. Its weight makes demands and subjugates indefinitely. How can such a reservoir, so impossible to bear, feel equally impossible to drain? As if by draining it her dead child would somehow die again.
          Recently, I felt a sense of redemption. I suppose in a similar vein as must MADD women feel when they take on drunk driving at large, or as Annie, my client feels, when we’ve worked hard to ready her for testifying against her rapist. She’s willing to re-traumatize herself, to face him, in order to protect other women from harm.
          And Lucy, whose lunacy I love–long lashed, hair extended, pierced, ringed with guilt, and obsessively attached to minute-by-minute doses of attention—who brought in her boyfriend unannounced, to one of her sessions with me. Several weeks ago he had tried to strangle himself with a cell phone charger cord and she called police, arriving at his home just as the cops arrived, to stop him. Earlier, he’d sent despairing texts and then went radio silent. She said, “I had an intuition.”
          About to go back to his army base down south where he serves as an infantryman, we talked about their relationship. The usual stuff, unclear or not enough communication. A volume of misunderstandings, all generated by awkward and truncated language and unclosed loops. Texting can decapitate words and amputate limbs of thought and feeling. Disemboweled from their bodies of context and meta-contexts, they float like clouds, weightless, yet subject to multiple interpretations. Lucy, unfiltered, litters the space between them with multiple accusations, attacks, and interrogations.
          I asked Lucy’s boyfriend, Joe, point blank: “Are you well enough, mentally, emotionally, to return to your duties? Are you still experiencing suicidal impulses?”
          He said he had a counselor awaiting him, and lots of support. That he felt much better. I thanked him for sharing this information, as he is not my client and we had no prior consent. In that moment we were, however, all three of us, tied into the same conversation, and all conversations radiate some directives beyond themselves, even if they remain unconscious. I take it that words are important. Both which words. And, sometimes, as Lucy and I have discussed, saying them at all.
          Lucy cries often. The weight of her obsession feels so unmanageable, migratory; even mythic. But now she sees herself as one of the world’s saving graces. She inks it into the fabric of her being like she might a new tattoo. Permanent until she dies.
          The next time I see her, she says she feels frustrated that Joe’s phone is off or always dying because he can’t be alone with a phone charger.
          I don’t know if this relationship will last; she is constantly unlacing its shoes, tripping over her accusations of infidelity and inattention, when really, behind Joe’s back, she fucks men she works with, like punctuation between shifts at the nursing home—in bathrooms and diaper closets–where the ancient and infirm residents love her because of her kindness and light touch.
          She wants me to help her do what she calls, ‘growing up.’ Mostly, she makes a jungle gym of Joe’s words, climbing on top of them, swinging from them, burning herself on the hot slide of a comment she’s interpreted as an insult. And then, blowing up his phone. I tell her we all suffer in translation sometimes, and that we might take a beat before making assumptions; that her words are important. Both which words. And, sometimes, I remind her again, not saying them at all.
          A decade ago two widowed people revealed how even a single word can cinch together a whole set of traumatic experiences. The more those noxious memories surface, the tighter their pull on the noose from which they dangle.
          Stan met Joy at a grief group for youngish people whose spouses had died. Two years later they came to me for help with their new, intimate relationship. Stan, a poet, had experienced sexual trauma for many years as a child, and the perpetrators were relatives. Intimate experiences with Joy brought on a sense of suffocation, engulfment, and submission.
          After several meetings, since he loved words, I asked if he had ever had any experience, any experience at all, about which he might say that he had, “surrendered himself to joy.” He laughed at the double entendre and then dropped his head, reflective for a moment. He looked up, eyes moist. He took Joy’s hand. She had stood with him at the graveside of his late spouse, as he had stood with her at the graveside of her late spouse. He smiled.
          “Ah,” he said. So slowly, tasting the word, turning it over in his mouth. In his mind. “Surrendering to joy.”
          Not submission. Intentional surrender.
          I saw them again, a year later. They planned to move in together and had some trouble deciding whether either one of their houses would suit or they needed to buy a new one. He reminded me of our conversation, and how something had shifted for him. Certainly not a complete antidote to years of suffering, but a way of holding onto the end of the rope Joy held out to him. A rope at the middle of which stood the proud knot they had recently tied.

*****

          When we came back from our monkish walk and slipped into our places around a long table to resume the writing workshop, we closed loops and tied things up, just to untie them a moment later, so that we could say goodbye. With a knot of satisfaction, everything seemed part of everything. I bowed below the table to retie my shoes.

3. Bows

          We tie gifts with a bow. A double slip knot. The hidden insides of gifts perk us into an excited state. Sniff. Shake. Heft up and down. Overturn. Some gifts are given intentionally. Others occur randomly.
          The experience of giftedness can arrive suddenly; elating. Like the presence of a snowy owl on a tree nearby, blinking its eyes, or an impossibly coral-toned sunset reflected on a lake or the cooling scarf of an unexpected breeze on a hot, hot day. Or a poem slipping from the covers of a book inadvertently, that speaks, so exactly, to our hearts at that moment. Or an unearned compliment. Or a joke that rocks the house. Or four year old Lili who says, “My ears make movies. I hear them and see them. I have amazing ears!”
          Later, after the writing workshop, Stephen and I arrive at our cottage on Lake Ossipee, where the snow lies on the ground less deep than I feared. The unseasonable thaw has made small pools in the sun, but left iced surfaces in the shade. We shovel in front and in back and find no flooding around or in the house.
          Inside the little house, we unwrap this gift of place. Our bodies slip into the quiet here. Our summer neighbors are nowhere in sight, and no workers—dock builders, landscapers, handymen, pest controllers–have parked with their lunch boxes, boom boxes and gallons of water. We hear no orchestra of honest labors—nail guns, circular saws, or air compressors.
          I crave this kind of untied. Untethered to the many cues of home that call to me in their chorus of disenchanted voices—the full dishwasher, the bills to pay, endless paperwork wanting its quotient of signatures in ink, the phone calls to return, packages to send, the new plans to accept or decline.
          We do not need to talk. The orange kettle with water for tea whistles and neither of us runs for it. Then, I let the tea steep for a long time. So often, what I prepare is seasoned with rushing. Rushing. It is a hot and tidy spice taking up most of the room on my spice shelves. Ubiquitous, it leaves a distinctive aroma everywhere I’ve been, as pale faced people have said to me about the aromas lingering from Indian foods cooked in Lowell apartment complexes. Turmeric. Cumin. Garam-masala. For me, these spices elongate, equilibrate, and reduce inflammation. I love them. Even their names sound like one-word poems.
          As the Indian poet, Rabindrath Tagore, wrote in “And in Wonder and Amazement I Sing”: “The world is swayed / By eternity’s rushing tide / Rising and falling.”

          We enjoy the gift of un-rushing. The hush of it. The wind chime hanging all winter long sings; a pentatonic reminder of everything that pulsates on this vibrant planet to which we are so briefly and preciously tethered.
          Daylight slips out of itself into darkness, untying our shoes, our thoughts, our resistances. We too slip. Slip.