After Deciding to Stay

Something I started doing unconsciously in 2015 was using solstices as a time of reflection. I remember it started then because June of that year was the first time I had been anywhere but the Mountain West — and specifically Greater Yellowstone — for summer solstice.

I guess I eventually figured out that without the familiar, tangible markers of seasonal transition in the region that I still feel the greatest sense of belonging to, I had to create my own transit to another season. Over time, I found myself applying this to winter solstice, too. That came with somewhat less effort, though, as my birthday is quite proximate to that solstice, and I’ve found it useful to treat birthdays as a time of reflection for myself. It’s a departure, I think, from the dominant culture’s attitude toward birthdays.

From a young age, it always felt off to me that birthdays were positioned as occasions for unfettered celebration. I seem to recall having a run of birthdays in elementary school that were just like any other day of child Jackie feeling homely and awkward at best and suicidal at worst. I think I came to resent birthdays for not living up to the advertised hype of being somehow exceptional. In turn, my tactic through a lot of my adolescence and early adult years was to try to actively avoid calling attention to my birthday.

But since my mid-twenties, they’ve taken on a different meaning for me. The reflection and stock-taking that I’ve most recently gravitated toward is part of it, but there is a dimension of observance for me now — something like celebration, but quieter. It’s more like reverence. That has partly come from how I approach winter solstice already. But this is the first year that the reflective dimension doesn’t feel like a compromise I’ve made up to help me deal with this coincidence of aging and the calendar onset of winter that I find myself in the middle of each year. No, reflection feels germaine now to the way that I apprehend both through this hemisphere’s darkest days of the year.

For the past few years now — maybe even as part of my reflective practice — I’ve found myself leaning hard on the poems of Jim Harrison in the winter. Something about the corporeal and spiritual experience of life rendered through the poems of a fellow Sagittarius feels uniquely suited for the season. I feel the same way about Emily Dickinson, but then, I also find excuses to read Dickinson and Harrison year-round. So perhaps it’s misleading to say this ritual is somehow special to winter, but it certainly feels more intense and immersive this time of year.

Anyway, it’s been easy to uphold my traditional winter reading of Harrison this year with the timely release of his complete collection of poetry by Copper Canyon Press this month. The December launch event hosted by Copper Canyon was wonderful, but the event welcoming this collection into the world that I found unspeakably moving actually took place back in October and was hosted by the Montana Book Festival. I’m not sure that I can explain what made the October event so magical other than it really felt like a loving remembrance among friends and family. Kinship might be the word I’m reaching for, and it took on a literal dimension when Jamie Harrison joined the lineup at the last minute in the absence of Terry Tempest Williams.

Every minute of the October event was stirring — most of it made me tear up, but several parts also made me laugh out loud (including Dombrowski’s not-to-be-missed Harrison impersonation that he said he wasn’t going to do). It’s impossible to say any one thing that was said or read stood out above the rest. Nonetheless, a certainly memorable part featured selections from Harrison’s Letters to Yesenin read by Colum McCann, whose Irish touch somehow elevated an already harrowing collection of poems to a rapturous level.

Letters to Yesenin is heavy to say the least. It’s a series of 30 poems, more or less addressed to the Russian lyric poet Sergei Yesenin. The speaker is fixated heavily on Yesenin’s death by suicide at the age of 30 and contemplating the noose’s promise of ultimate escape for himself.

For folks who have no relationship to suicidality, I can fathom how such a conceit for a series of prose-poems could sound indulgent and self-pitying. But I think maybe even people who can’t relate to the impulse for self-annihilation or the sense of escape it would promise would be moved by the complexity they’ll find in Letters to Yesenin. It’s not as though the speaker had lost perspective. After McCann’s reading, the group of featured readers were quick to call attention back to a powerful image at the end of the third poem:

Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

I didn’t have any relationship to Letters to Yesenin before McCann’s reading. Yet as soon as he finished, before the event was even over, I knew it’d be the first section of poems I’d read for the first time whenever my pre-ordered copy of Harrison’s Complete Poems finally made it to my doorstep. That conviction came from what I already knew about the conclusion to the letters from the discussion around it. I’m speaking specifically of the Postscript following the 30th letter:

Today you make me want to tie myself to a tree, stake my feet to earth herself so I can’t get away. It didn’t come as a burning bush or pillar of light but I’ve decided to stay.

That willful choice to stay on one’s own terms — it’s difficult to explain how hard it is to arrive at that, much less how it defines the way you go about the rest of your life. Letters to Yesenin feels like a transcript or some kind of oral history of that passage. That passage is precisely the reason that I have a genuine reverence for birthdays now. They hit different when you know that you’ve decided to be around for more of them, rather than passively accepting them as guaranteed or even desirable.

Having the chance to finally read through all of Letters to Yesenin feels like a tribute to what I now recognize as the through-line of the first 25 or so years of my life. I look at those years now as experiencing and learning what I had to in order to truly decide to be alive for whatever years of natural life I’m allotted.

The better part of three decades seems like a long time to figure out the terms of the lease you want to have for the rest of your shift in human form in this universe. But maybe that’s another one of those secrets you have to figure out on your own that they don’t really advertise — that you have to put in a lot of time before you even know how you want to live your life. It’s the kind of thing that maybe I wish I could impart to a younger version of myself who would’ve given anything for an early and painless departure, but I can understand how hollow something like that will always sound to somebody who hasn’t yet lived their own way into that earned wisdom.

Maybe coming up on my first Saturn return next month at the ripe age of 29 is a bit early to jump to any sweeping conclusions, but having gotten out of the woods of one foundational existential crisis (for now), I wonder if this next stretch of years might be less about deciding to stay and more about remembering.

I’ve always been pretty obsessed with memory. I think more than a few people who have said things in front of me that they didn’t want to be held to account for have lived to rue the kind of preternatural memory I’ve had from a young age. I often wonder how much of my sharp memory is innate and how much of it owes to a sort of chip on my shoulder around wanting to prove to people that I pay close attention. Certainly, some of it must also owe to a heightened need for situational awareness that has more to do with childhood trauma than anything. Either way, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with just the sheer volume of precise information I’ve committed to memory in what I recognize is a fairly unremarkable span of years relative to the whole of geologic or even human history.

But that relationship has become less complicated as of late. Memory has become a lot more precious to me, and I see it as a much more collective than individual concept nowadays. That is, my own memory isn’t the only one I have to draw from. Even so, I’ve always been kind of paranoid about how I would fare if/when people in my life start actively losing their own memory. It’s a concern I haven’t had to fully contend with yet, but I worry how much my predilection for remembering may harm people if my knee-jerk reaction is to correct them. But even my perspective on that has changed quite recently.

Because the filmmaker Mike Mills is also kind of obsessed with memory, it should surprise nobody that I’m roundly obsessed with his work. In what I realize is a super meta phenomenon, I have pretty clear memories of my theatrical experiences with the last few feature-length projects from Mike Mills. Time will tell if my relationship to his latest, C’mon C’mon, will be any exception, but so far it’s stuck with me in the immediate days after viewing — probably more than anything has since…my theatrical experience with Mike Mills’ last feature film in 2016? I can’t be sure. In any event, near the end of C’mon C’mon, the main character Johnny is lying next to his young nephew Jesse and they’re explicitly discussing the prospect of remembering time they’ve spent together. It builds up to Johnny saying that Jesse will likely forget — the implication being Jesse’s so young, still developing, and he’s been experiencing some upheaval as his mother is away trying to care for his father through a mental health crisis. But Johnny promises to remind Jesse of everything so their shared memories aren’t lost for him.

The dynamic between an older and younger person in the scenario Mills wrote and directed is a reversal from the one I’ve always feared: that of having to be in a position to decide whether I correct an elder loved one’s recollection. But the very sweet interaction between Johnny and Jesse kind of opened my eyes to what’s fundamentally misplaced about my concern. The tension should never be around correcting people. It’s about reminding them.

Maybe approaching it that way will alter what I feel the need to even say to somebody I love when they can’t remember something. Maybe deciding whether to do that at all will still be difficult in the heat of the moment, but framing it this way makes it feel like it’s possible to remind people from a place of compassion and empathy, rather than frustration, impatience, or condescension. I also realize this shouldn’t be limited to situations with loved ones who are actively losing their memory as a result of age and wear. I think it’s just as important to remind the people who are showing up for me now, not so much of facts and details, but of what they’ve survived and how I will remember them as somebody who cares about them.

As a matter of empathy, I can say I would welcome a friendship or kinship based in that sense of responsibility to remind one another. And with realizing that, I think I’m reconciling with the fact that my eerie command of memory might be a principal thing I have to offer in this terrestrial lifetime. If that’s the case, that feels like a really fortunate progression. It’s as though the will to stay has evolved into the will to not forget.

As a reflective exercise for myself, I started a list of things I hope I’m remembered for. While I may not ask some people in my life for a similar list per se, the process has inspired me to maybe start asking some of my ride-or-dies what they want to be remembered for. Not because I don’t already have my own impression of them shaped by my own experience and perspective. Rather, I look at it more as a way to recognize the current hopes and intentions of the people I care about.

I can’t think of any precedent in my adult life for creating space to express that within my own support system, as it were. I feel like there are often simple goal-setting practices in occupational and academic settings that approximate it, but nothing really tailored to life in an overarching sense. Maybe that’s evidence of my own failure to find any real, healthy kind of community grounded in reflection and reciprocity. Or maybe it’s a reflection of a larger failure in culture or society that something like this is so elusive. In recent months, however, I’ve begun to interpret conundrums like this differently. When something is hard to find, I’ve kind of begun taking it as a commission to build it myself in a way that feels true to my own sense of spirituality and kinship.

So I suppose I’ll be chipping away at naturalizing this practice of remembering and reminding for years to come. For now, in the spirit of using my solstice-adjacent birthday and the impending milestone of my first Saturn return to reflect on my current hopes and intentions, I’ve put together a running list of what I want to be remembered for. If it motivates some of you like-minded weirdos out there to partake in the reflective witchery of winter solstice by creating your own version, great. If you have a place to informally register it — either a friend or core group who will remember your hopes and intentions, and remind you of them should you forget — even better. As a veritable hermit, I kind of can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think the more collective recognition and will we can establish around our hopes and intentions, the more likely we are to manifest good shit and remember how we did it.

I hope I’m remembered for:

1. Believing in myself enough to approach every pizza like it’s a personal pizza
2. Being dedicated, if a little daft and boorish — like I imagine a mule who’s read a lot of Rilke being
3. Not being afraid of the dark
4. Being outspoken when necessary, even if I’m not outgoing
5. Frightening affluent white men in ways that no economic exchange can save them from — like the caustic, Mary MacLane of a queer Marxist witch I aspire to be
6. My Hocus Pocus laugh (by the Gardinerites and Mammothites from the way back)
7. That streaking streak I had in my teens (also by the Gardinerites and Mammothites)
8. My outstanding impersonation of Robin Williams as Genie saying, “I can’t believe it. I’m losing to a rug” (by my sister)
9. Being Sister Jack (also by my sister)
10. Being difficult
11. My bizarre, lifelong run of good drivers license photos even though I look like a cartoon character in all other photos
12. Looking kind of like a cartoon character
13. My unconditional solidarity in our shared struggle against dispossession and extraction
14. My unconditional commitment to learning about our shared struggle against dispossession and extraction
15. Always sounding more like myself
16. Being full of piss and vinegar
17. Opining the following:
    What if we just started diverting all our waste away from the only living planet and into space instead? I’m all for minimizing what we consume to begin with and recognize this could backfire in unforeseen ways. But WHAT IF atmospheric gases speed up the pace of bio-digestion? And wouldn’t it be hilarious if all those commercial space tourists just had to cruise through landfills in perpetual orbit? I think it would be!
18. Not discovering Katie Crutchfield’s cover of “With You” until 2020 and proceeding to listen to it more than a body has a right to (and probably more than anyone else alive)
19. Mobilizing the masses around the need for a “Crazy on You” cover from Brandi Carlile and the Hanseroth twins
20. Being an alright descendant and a better ancestor
21. Being helpful
22. Being strenuously honest
23. Expressing kindness and love by paying close attention
24. Reducing harm
25. Validating trauma
26. Being physically and psychologically built for punishing uphill slogs
27. My dad jokes — both my mastery of and advocacy for them
28. Deciding to stay
29. Remembering
30. Reminding people of what they’ve survived and what I will remember them for
31. Having an emotional and spiritual range fit for the mutable fire sign — capable of a quiet smolder, a roaring conflagration, and everything in between

This month’s feature image: A snowperson in what I believe is a 1967 Chrysler Newport. Spotted in Bozeman, December 14, 2013 — when the median price for single-family homes there was reportedly 42% of what it is now. To think we all thought Bozeman was getting bougie back then. Ah, innocence! Now it’s not just the snowpeople having to stay overnight in their cars through the winter. If any of us survive this new gilded age, I vow to remember stuff like this, stuff that we endured.