“And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!”
—Work, Sometimes by Mary Oliver
I’ve been taking walks lately. Not something I have done often in New York this year, between the weather and the pandemic. I tend to step out at the end of the day and walk west, a drumbeat in my headphones, the sinking sun blinking orange between the tops of buildings. It’s September now, and my beloved summer is slipping away, I can feel it. There’s a cool lid now on the scorching streets; even the daylight seems a different color, sooner on its way.
The people I pass are faceless save their eyes, peering out over masks of every color. We are even stranger to each other now than we already were as strangers. Most businesses close early now, their neon signs unlit and ghostly. Up ahead the rolling gate on a closed storefront has been painted over in a myriad of colors, the words No justice, no peace at its center. These are new things, markers of this year. But still I can’t shake the thought: I have been here before.
I have. Sort of. The last time I was unemployed was precisely this time of year, the lazy tip-over from August into September. The unsteady shifting of the seasons somehow magnified the limbo I found myself in. In a lot of ways it resembled this one: barely leaving the house, seeing very few people outside my household, filling out job applications, filling the hours, or at least trying to. Trying to clear, like fallen woodbrush in a storm, the panic and hopelessness that would alternately come over me.
Sometime in September of that year, I decided that if I didn’t have a reason to leave the house by mid-afternoon, I would force myself out for a walk. I had to stay out for the length of a podcast episode, or a short album, and then I could go home. I walked past busted fire hydrants and the screaming children running through their spray. I walked past the invisible border between the lower-income Queens rows I lived on and the hip, string-light-terrace, renovated-balcony cluster that was slowly creeping east. I walked over broken asphalt and under a magnolia tree overhanging from someone’s yard. I got to know my neighborhood better over those never-ending weeks than in the year I had already lived there. No matter how many robotic cover letters I had banged out, no matter how much I wanted to curl in on myself until the sun went down, I always felt better after that slow afternoon loop, a soundtrack in my ears.
I am there again, but it’s different now. I have no sanctuary of my own — I’m a guest in the apartment I’m staying in, with a welcome that is wearing out by the week. My walks are punctuated with wariness, watching for maskless faces, for sprawling dining sidewalks. This time I don’t know how long this Lethe season, this fugue state, will last.
In coming back to walking as a practice (I say practice, because it is something I have to consciously choose, even when it feels difficult or the conditions aren’t ideal), I’ve thought often of the poet Mary Oliver. She considered walking an essential part of the work of opening herself to the world — and consequently, letting in the poem she would write from it: “I take walks. Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious. It's a joke here in town: I take a walk and I'm found standing still somewhere. This is not a walk to arrive; this is a walk that's part of a process.”
In the early September haze, I walked a handful of blocks south to meet a couple of friends on a park bench. I stretched my arms toward them, my hands curling longingly. We laughed the kind of laugh that covers grief like paint. We marveled that it had been six months of this version of reality. My friend shook her head: Remember when we thought it would be back to normal by the summer? Only now, with the distance of calendar pages, are we realizing how foggy that arrival seems. How imprecise and wobbly of a fawn-walk it will be.
I told them they were the first friends in the city I had seen in person in six months. They looked shocked — six months? Not even sitting in a park with someone? No, I said, I’m still learning what feels safe, I only now feel safe. Part of the process.
And sometimes the process feels like it runs backwards, tape rewinding. Yesterday, after hours of anxiety pressing in on my skull, I ventured out just before sunset — and found the streets choked, the patios full, stoops crowded. I was back at my doorstep after a mere ten minutes, my throat tight, my head pounding worse than before.
In a year like this one, there is little room for respite. The steps to it feel long and numberless.
Mary Oliver’s poems are known for the way they somehow bring together the minute and the magnificent. She both pulls focus on nature’s details (“Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. / Here the clam deep in the speckled sand”) and thoughtfully encompasses presentness, life, and death (“Every morning I walk like this around / the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart / ever close, I am as good as dead”).
I think of her often when I walk: I try to come out of my head — where all my thoughts jostle like so many elbows on the subway — and into my body, into the world. It doesn’t come easy when my backdrop is a busy, compact street in Brooklyn, rather than a pinewoods footpath in Provincetown. It isn’t easy when the country is metaphorically and quite literally burning on one coast and flooding on another. But oh, Mary, I am trying. Trying to see the process in it, not the arrival. I am trying to be as curious as I was the first time, the first walking season, when there was nothing but September’s fading light and the streets to hold me.
I feel it rising in my throat sometimes, the wild-hare instinct to bolt. I think about leaving New York for good, the exit I have imagined and abandoned for years. I think about my other citizenship, my motherland beckoning. To slip from this steel trap of a year that binds me, wounded and screaming, waiting for the inevitable shattering of bone.
But sometimes words are enough to temper madness. By which I mean, even the wildest thought turns tame when you find it expressed by someone else.
And Mary has the words for my madness, too.
“As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.”
Parting notes—
Mary Oliver poems I have quoted in this piece, in order:
I also highly recommend going on a walk and listening to this rare and gorgeous interview with Mary Oliver by Krista Tippett, from the podcast On Being.