digging in the dirt.

a messy return to writing.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt like writing again. It both scared and surprised me. Almost immediately, I felt pressure—pressure to make something cohesive, pressure to make what I have to say after so long really, really profound.

Lisa Olivera’s latest offering reminded me that showing up messy is showing up truthfully. I’ve felt like I’ve been digging around in the dirt lately, with nothing more to show for it than earth under my fingernails. But maybe that’s the stuff that I’m supposed to show right now.

I am scared to want things too much. I worry that, in the wanting, in the naming of my desire, I drive it away.

A few months ago, I received a beautiful reading from Jenn. I showed up chaotically, with a bad Internet connection and a mug of tea that I hadn’t let brew long enough. I don’t remember a lot of what she told me—I was fragmented, not fully present—but I remember that, at one point, I asked her whether it was in my chart that I would one day have a child.

A flamboyant tree in full bloom. Photo by my friend Darean.

She paused. I remember the pause.

“If you decide that you want it enough.”

I still think about her response. The wanting of things. Whether I can allow myself to fully desire something new, something I, for a long time, said I did not want.

I feel weak when I want, like a crumpled up version of myself, a paper doll dragged through a puddle and left to dissolve into the pavement.

I want to let myself want.

My friend Pardis is writing her dissertation.

I see her frequently, sitting in coffee shops or tucked up against a bar with a glass of wine, her computer open and her brow furrowed as she wades through ideas and words.

She tells me that she is tired of metaphors, of academics trying to make something else out of something that should just…be. She just wants to tell the stories of St. Croix, of the Caribbean, without the pressure of “adding to the discourse” or whatever term the ivory tower wants to use.

I ask her to tell me what she’s writing about.

She tells me about the baobab trees with their hollow trunks. Their seeds were carried by enslaved Africans to the island in mouths, in twists of hair, in closed hands—a talisman of protection, a rebellion. Women birth their children inside the spine of the tree. When the moon is full, the tree is believed to be a portal back to Africa. Step inside and return home.

A baobab tree in Mexico.

I am fascinated by her stories, gleaned from conversations with those who are of the island, the true holders of history. I don’t know what it all means, but I don’t care. I just want to listen to her comb her fingers through the loose threads that she’s gathered.

Part of me thinks knitting them together into something will take away part of the magic.

Most evenings, I walk up a dirt road behind where I live.

There’s a place where the path splits. You can go up, or you can go down.

The first few times, I went down, where I knew the outcome. At the bottom of the hill, wasps waltz in and out of fermenting mangoes, squished by passing tires. A cluster of houses sighs next to the road. The stop sign is bent back and to the side. No one listens to it.

One day, I went up the hill instead. I was curious.

I walked past blown-out cars, their rusted carcasses sinking into the earth. The hollow pods of a stinking toe fruit tree¹ rattled under my feet, making an empty sort of music.

The road moved sharply up. I began to sweat. My breath was loud, labored. I picked my way around hairpin turns, one after another, and then, finally, the world opened up.

I stood there, my shoulders heaving towards my ears, and I felt better than I had in a long time. I counted the orange flamboyant trees on the horizon and listened as the wavy tones of a distant radio wound their way across the hill.

When I began my walk, the air had been still, heavy. Now, it danced. It roared, it moved.

On Facebook, I saw a post by a friend entitled “MADE FROM SCRATCH.”

Beneath was a list of various foods—biscuits, pies, jellies—and my friend had noted which ones she had made from scratch.

I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. Made from scratch.

It made me think of women in gingham dresses and frilly aprons, guiding rolling pins over pale circles of dough. Of cellar walls, lined with preserved peaches and briny okra. Of restaurants with homey decor and prices without dollar signs next to them.

It made me think of how the world values things made from scratch. And how much I expect myself to make from scratch.

My food. My art. My dreams. My body.

I knead flour and water and yeast into dough. I stretch and contort my limbs into shapes that I hope will let me live a little longer and better. I stop my ears like Odysseus and write in silence, scared to accidentally reference something I once read and liked.

I am tired of wanting to be made from scratch.

The other day, I watched a hen stand on a patch of dirt next to the road and dig her claws into the dust.

She scratched and scratched and scratched, kicking up clouds or particles and moving the earth until it yielded what she desired.

I longed to drop close to the ground with her and search, to claw and dig and pry and not make anything but find instead.

I’m learning to value what I find, even if I don’t know what it means or does or says. Even if I didn’t say it first or best.

I am deeply afraid of not having anything to say. But I am more afraid of saying nothing at all.

I feel like coming back to Everyday Woo. I’m leaning into that right now, but I’m not committing. No more business plans, weird monetization emails that ask you to pay me to write…I just can’t do it. I don’t want to do it.

But I do want to write. There’s so much I want to share—about St. Croix, about what energies I’m feeling, about what patch of dirt I’m digging through.

I’ll probably pop up in your inbox every so often. I do hope you write me back or tell me about your own dirt mining and what you’ve found.

Until then.

1. Yes, that’s really what they’re called. According to Pardis, they taste like “dry, stinky cheese.” Yum.