What if tomorrow we were to wake with minds clear and deep enough to know ourselves beyond the labels that identify us? And if tomorrow were today because I drafted this question yesterday, would we not confront—from the Latin for stand face to face with—our exposure? The pink teacups of the magnolia outside my window dip and pour rainwater into the wind, and I gawk at the irony of thinking I cannot live without an internal defense mechanism that distinguishes me from that tree, the woman who planted it, and my neighbor across the chain link fence who named his dachshunds Bo and Daisy.
Do you see the fault in the paradigm we have long constructed and enabled each other to uphold? We cannot even prepare drivers to transition intersections to four-way stops when, during power outages, traffic lights fail. Laughable that we spend so much energy attempting to buttress ourselves against the unknown with egos, pitiable illusions reliable only in their need for greater fabrication and patchwork maintenance. For every program coded into our behavior, there are anomalous circumstances. There is a logical fallacy for every if-this-then-that syllogism. All the while, underlying that notion of control, hearts beat, lungs swell, and genes express chromosome 16.8 but not chromosome 17.39.
I lay in a hospital bed for eighty hours one November twenty years ago being shuttled in and out of this world. Though I wanted to live, I could not keep myself alive. Though I had gotten into a car accident, I had not tried to die.
At some point in everyone’s life, often more than once, the tower of cards topples. Instead of rushing to restack our cards or rifling through them for reasons, can we help each other recover something from loss other than opinions?
Why do you want to know? When we see through a question to the shadow it casts, we find a trustworthy orientation tool, since every shadow reveals the position of its illumination. We can follow its guide as some turn to compasses of constellations or the moss-covered trunks of trees. Every map evolves, but none make us wiser than the ancients who bowed their heads to the stars in thanks.
Can we begin today, then, with open minds uplifted like bowls or tulips? Ask why you care about anything you care about. Ask what you can do to better recognize others, repair racism, undo patriarchalism, legislate environmental protections, and end the violence crazing this planet unremittingly as Neptunian winds. Then wait, in the darkness of not yet knowing, for the answer is not the point. The point comes into focus at that angle where the slender figure of your shadow emerges and throws at your feet the glow of North.
Amy Wright served as the 2022 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence at East Tennessee State University and recently introduced and co-edited the Virginia volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. She has authored three poetry books and six chapbooks and received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her nonfiction debut, Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, (Sarabande Books) won the 2022 Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose.