Wayward

I’d long thrown out the idea of destination – it was toxic vocabulary, in my mind, and a wild wish against fate.

I’ve been slowly going through The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, whose essays (needless to say) are absolutely groundbreaking. Two essays that I’ve been thinking about: “Uses of the Erotic” and “The Uses of Anger,” have changed the way I think about feeling, community and action. “Free Your Mind…” by Ijeoma Oluo, published just two days ago, adds a necessary dimension to the conversation by addressing the limits of personal emotional freedom.

This week’s Two Pages has been a way for me to process these essays and my own unrelated thoughts...

Where do you want to go, you ask, and I answer without words but with worry. I’d long thrown out the idea of destination – it was toxic vocabulary, in my mind, and a wild wish against fate. And yet, the idea remained like a pearl, hidden in an oyster’s throat. 

I’ve been afraid of destinations. I’ve been avoiding goals and all the personal infrastructure I set up in the new year. I say I want freeform but I simply don’t want the option to fail.

Since when was there all this fear, I ask myself, when just a week ago, everything was fine? 

The way I think it all breaks:

• A dose of meanspiritedness 

• An ego vulnerable to being broken

The way it actually breaks:

• A peeling away, the lack of a definable origin point, anger, confusion, guilt.

I’m rarely angry, so the feeling surprises me. I live in a general state of anxiety, so the answer to my earlier question: there was always fear. What else can we guard ourselves with besides our anticipations? What other armour do we have? 

Anger disrupted something. Made way for clarity and an astronomical haziness. Maybe I’m being too vague, but none of the specifics make sense anyway. I’ve pieced and re-pieced but the feelings don’t make a story. The feelings can only be felt, overlapping and reverberating.

I think long and hard about the question – where do I go. Anger bulldozes right past the question. Then, the feeling of not having gone anywhere for a long time. The inability to go anywhere right now. Physically. Mentally. Whole bodily. Without fear and risk.

Tomorrow I’ll be volunteering at an urban farm. It’s the most courage I’ve mustered in a long time, which speaks to the measure of things in my grasp and the comparably larger issues we face. 

Where do I want to go?

My feelings are wayward. My anger spreads outward and anywhere. The destination is personal and therefore easily meaningless. The destination, in my experience, has been continually emptied. 

-

The farm is big, but I can’t recall the number of acres. I can only recall the slope of a large hill and a flat plain of vegetable rows crowned with native plants. 

If we could all go around and say our name and why you’re here… the volunteer manager prompts. I found the farm on Thrillist, I blurt out.

I don’t say, anger. I don’t say, confusion. I don’t say, religion or fervor. I don’t say, guilt. The reasons don’t matter anyway. I realize with relief that only the task matters. 

We spend the first half of the day clearing out a row for lettuce. We start by removing what’s there: three lines of brussel sprouts. The volunteer manager instructs us to cut the stem below soil level. It keeps the plant from sprouting again. I take my shears and dig into the ground. I miss the stem, which grows at a slant beneath the earth. Almost immediately I feel old workouts in my thighs and my arms. A soreness spreads through my body and my initial enthusiasm is replaced with focus. 

The volunteer manager reiterates the importance of the “no till method.” Disturbing the soil releases unnecessary carbon into the air. I don’t know anything about farming or even gardening. I have a few plants on my windowsill, that’s all. Here, seemingly little things can be big things, even if those big things are ideological. We want to be a model of the no till method, which is better for the environment, the volunteer manager explains.

The downside of the no till method is that the soil is easily compacted, making it harder for the soil to retain water. We avoid stepping on our vegetable row and we rake the soil softly. Growing is a careful process. Managing the growth is all the more meticulous. And the growth is not metaphorical. In two months, the lettuce will be harvested.

Before we started working, the volunteer manager led us through the farm. His words charted another path as he told us about the land’s indigenous roots and the harvest’s eventual future. He didn’t tell us that the work at the farm was always done in groups, but I soon noticed that even simple tasks were done in pairs. There was a friendliness to the farm and the people who ran it.

As we worked, I wondered how much of this work had to feel fun so that volunteers would stay. I felt the stirring of guilt: You really don’t need to accommodate me! I will come back! But maybe work decoupled from capitalism can allow for emotions like fun without a negative counterpart. The farm is public space, a place that helps address food insecurity and environmental justice while also serving as a space for community and flourishing. The farm lives beyond the personal.

Perhaps this is the moment when I say that the farm enlightened me. You might roll your eyes just as I begin making the communal about the individual. You might expect me to say that I learned something with my hands and my body.

But at the end of the day, I still felt guilt and confusion and anger and all the feelings that were there before. I was no more enlightened then as I was before. If I were to chart change, then the transformation would take place in the act of writing. The lesson would be the meta lesson: the conclusion, like the destination, is empty.