manifesto (a new year’s reflection)

I suppose the making is never as easy as we would hope.

First, there is the twinging of your heart when you have a great idea at midnight, and thinking “I’ll remember it in the morning,” instead of writing it down. Like you’ve ever remembered a good idea in the morning. You wake up, thinking about that weird dream you had where the boy from your fourth grade Sunday school class saved you from a burning building (true story), which is definitely not your incredible midnight change-the-world idea.

Second, there is a different idea, definitely less brilliant than the midnight idea, that you do write down and think you’ll expand on it the next time you have a minute, which is never, because this is 21st century, where our specialization is threefold: confusion, distraction, and rage. The three of them growl like the three-headed dog of the underworld, staring at you, daring you to even consider that little thing called joy and the way it makes you laugh, or possibly even weep, at unforeseen moments. Intimidation is not necessarily a great breeding ground for art. Unless you actually stare the whole system right in the eye and make an effort to extract yourself from the entire city, the country, the world, basically. Which leads us to:

Third, the sitting down to actually do the thing. Sometimes I’d rather do literally anything else. Go for a run, wash the dishes, clean my bathroom, sleep a little extra in the snowy morning and allow the time to slip away because that’s easier than slipping into the work, which is essentially slipping into the soul. Because somehow, the poems that, on a good day, fly out of my fingertips seem to demand both of those things that make life worth living: body and soul. The poems that are dead on arrival are usually missing one of the two. They’re either a good idea that forgot to breathe, or a nice full breath that was too afraid to actually say what she thought. Yes, it has to be both: body and soul, a little breath and a little bravery.

Isn’t that the way life goes, too?

I am learning that the closing of our heart to the ordinary making, to the ordinary poems of life, to change and newness, to that breath and bravery, sucks out the mystery (and the wonder, and the joy), as quick as anything, like those vacuums that are built right into the wall. Imagine a vacuum installed in the wall of your heart, sucking up the bad stuff but also the good stuff. If you have a vacuum, you don’t get to choose which bits disappear. Like, you might suck up your earrings with the lint and the dust. Or a twenty-dollar bill. Or a one-hundred, depending on the idea. It all goes away pretty quick.

And to be honest, until recently, I’d pretty much cleaned everything up inside of me.

Nothing was left except a few house plants that were withering up. In the last eight years, I’ve learned so much that has fundamentally changed the way I see the world. But the problem with gleaning large quantities of information in a fairly short amount of time is that sometimes you forget to keep learning—you become so preoccupied with the new things you’ve learned about the world, you decide you’ve pretty much figured it all out, so you decide to forget the old stuff, make peace with where you’re at now, and call it good. You close the windows and sit in the comfortable darkness with the vacuum running, self-assured and full of pride at how smart and talented you’ve become. You stop thinking about anything that might be different than what you’ve already concluded.

*notes from a past self / remembering the child inside me*

And one day, on your twenty-seventh birthday, your mother might stumble upon a binder of your old relics from the sixth grade, and inside, she might find an essay you wrote about your future. And she might read it to you, and you might burst into tears once you get to the end:

I would love to help kids in other areas besides teaching. I would love to help homeless children. I think it would be neat to be able to open a children’s home for these kids. Maybe it could even be a school and a home for them.

And you might cry because you forgot about the big, beautiful dreams that your twelve-year-old self was brave enough, willing enough to write down at some late hour of the night and tuck far away, despite the inconvenience and the fear, so your grown-up self would remember and rest in the fact that the leanings of her heart have, after this long while, wandered back to their beginnings.

You might realize that probably it would be good to fling the windows of your heart back open.

That there is hope, even though you have become preoccupied with yourself, with perception, with being good, good enough, as good as. Where is the joy in that, I ask you? Outside the window of my new house, two squirrels are climbing the snow-covered tree. I’m sure they’re chilly and they’re slipping a bit, but think of the exuberance, the view!

And, despite this cliche staring at me in the face, I guess the question I am asking myself at the start of Year Twenty-Seven is:

am I willing to adventure into the making, even though I might slip?

Am I willing to make a mess? Am I willing to scratch out an idea when I’d rather be asleep? Am I willing to wake up and watch the snowfall instead of sleeping through it? Am I willing to say the brave thing that would be easier left unsaid, and remain accountable to it? Am I willing to take up space for the view? Am I willing to try to do the thing that scares me? And to commit, for the rest of my life, to the telling about it?

Here’s what I somehow missed in in HOW-TO-BE-A-WOMAN class:

If you take up space, it might actually make more room for other people, and
Your words are important. They might not be for you. They might also be for you, fifteen years down the road. Or maybe they are for you, right this minute, and that’s also important. So write them. Write them!

Somehow, my childhood self knew this before my adult self forgot it. That little girl prophesied to me about this wild life, this heart of what I actually love and who I am—a little treasure, a moment in time, in space— a note from me and God, for me, a whisper of reassurance that this is the right track. The right key to press down. The juicy note in the major 7 chord.

The right match to strike.

At the start of this last year, I knew things would shift, pivot. There has been so much expected and unexpected change and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But it is hard to keep making in the midst of all of it. Hard to keep creating new things when nothing seems to be staying put.

And yet, somehow, it is in this messy process of making that we make ourselves, allow ourselves to be formed, for better or worse, into the person we are becoming. A college professor once said that whatever we picture when we hear the word “success” is what our lives will hurtle towards, whether or not we pay attention to it. So we might as well pay attention, and join in the work.

For so long, I thought I didn’t know what success was. I thought didn’t know what to make or how to make it. I was terrified of the failure, that I might make a mess instead of “good art.” My objective was “be cute and impressive,” which, ironically, always results in not-great-art. But, with God, I feel as if I am crossing to the other side of this, like I am in the middle of one of those really rickety wooden bridges from action movies set in the jungle. You know, the two ropes and some boards strung up across a canyon above a deadly river with a waterfall at the end. And I am moving, one board at a time, towards the heart of God beating inside of me, walloping against the edges of my chest.

I am learning that the mess is the good art. Learning to write, to watch the snow, to do what scares me, to write down the ideas no matter the time of day, or their quality, to risk being not-good, to love with my whole self, to move towards what is calling my name rather than hiding from it.

To listen. To beautify. To plunge. To flare.

That essay from grade school felt like major confirmation of all of this. Even that little girl knew what success was, what taking up my space in the world looks like for the person God is still making me into. It just took me this long to give my grown-up self the permission to follow the child inside of me, instead of the other way around.

As we enter into 2023, I am praying we all can pay attention to the children inside of us, and each other. And to you, my friends, I offer this toast:

To the 12-year-old inside of me, and all of us:

You have the fire. Light the match.

Do not be afraid.

Happy New Year, friends.

Alyssa

on transfiguration (for nanny)

questions, unanswered