Grief and joy are born of the same materials. The one needs the same stuff as the other.

I open my journal to a new page. Today is my mother’s birthday. Today I learn additional details about my dear friend’s newborn daughter’s upcoming heart surgery. Today I learn that my aunt’s mother had to have triple bypass surgery to address three of the seven blocked valves of her heart. Today I see a moth that I assume was once a caterpillar, the way assumption slips right out of knowing. If the cocoon is called “knowing” then it gives transformative birth, sooner or later, to assumption. But if the cocoon is called “imagination” then it gives transformative birth, sooner or later, to faith. Today I water the snap peas because at the very tips of their burnt yellow edges I see some green. Today I accept that one of the succulents is probably dead—my fault. Today I look at the probably dead succulent and remember the animal who passed away, prompting the bouquet that arrived at my doorstep from another dear friend and which miraculously contained, amidst the more traditional stems, two newborn succulents. Today I remember all the animals who have passed away, and my heart doesn’t know what to call itself, “knowledge” or “imagination” or “something else entirely.” It doesn’t know what it’s trying to give birth to.

~~~

On the new page of my journal, I write:

List of heart metaphors:
To give someone your heart
To have a heart of gold
To be cold-hearted, a stone person
To have the heart of a lion
To wear your heart on your sleeve
To spill your heart out on the page
To have your heart broken
To get to the heart of something

~~~

Ursula K. LeGuin, in 1986, challenged the Great Man theory and his great weapon, the killing stick—“spears and swords…things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things”—by advocating for Elizabeth Fisher’s “carrier bag theory,” wherein storage and carrying and inclusion contribute more consistently and directly to life than even the most glamorous and archaic weaponry. She celebrates specifically:

A leaf a gourd shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient….we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained.

The heart, too, is a container—another metaphor. It holds what we harvest. And it stores what we intend to share. And if we pay too much attention to “the tool that forces energy outward,” we risk forgetting that the heart, in its original newborn state, is also “the tool that brings energy home.”

My dear friend brought her newborn baby home from the hospital, a small baby whose body contains a wonderful, if slightly mis-functioning, heart. And my dear friend’s baby’s heart itself has the capacity to grow into a bigger heart, one that functions radiantly, one that allows the energy of the world to pass through it and gather up in its beating center, energy stored away for some upcoming, shared winter. And my dear friend’s baby’s heart is precisely what LeGuin is describing: the ritualistic site, the museum, the amphitheater—which is to say, the seminal gathering space: locus of such wide possibility, such expansive room, that it is precisely and only by addressing what the heart needs, any heart, that we can “fully, freely, gladly” call ourselves human.

~~~

It occurs to me that metaphors can also be cocoons, transforming language into a truth so unlike that first utterance of language, you might not even know it was the same beast. You might only recognize certain things because once, a long time ago, you were told what they were or would be.

As a young girl, I was told about metaphor and simile: being and becoming.

As a young girl, I was told about the caterpillar and the butterfly: silk and chrysalis and flying.

As a young girl, I was told about the reasons to guard my heart: ribcage and vulnerability and the male gaze.

And as a young girl, I wasn’t told about containers: my body, and how it might be seen, and what might be required of it, and the disappearing that would occur as a result of everything I may be expected to hold.

What I was, and what I would be.

My heart is a sugar snap pea plant, and some days it takes the act of witnessing the vague promise of green at its very edges to remember that I ought to be giving it water.

~~~

I learn that the Eagle Creek trail, a beloved gem of the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area that closed in 2017 due to the extreme consequences of a manmade fire, has re-opened for the first time in four years. My heart leaps.

I learn from my partner (who learned from a forest ranger) that in the past four years, due to the extreme consequences of man’s absence in that treasured area, all manner of wildlife—bears, bobcats, pika, birds—have taken up residency and established new habitats. My heart does something else entirely.

We hike it the next day.

I move a small fuzzy brown and black caterpillar from the middle of the trail and onto some plant matter, telling myself a story wherein I am not the intrusion myself. And I pretend that, as I go deeper into the forest and witness slug after slug after slug, I could somehow move every single one of them, every slug and caterpillar and ladybug now or forthcoming into existence, safely out of harm’s way. I pretend to always know what I’m stepping on. I pretend certain bugs are better than others, but I pretend all bugs are worse than animals. I pretend I am not walking through the most expansive and miraculous zoo every time I step outside. I call a zoo, “awe-inspiring,” and I call the everyday outside, “normal.” I call my feet “careful” and I call my actions “well-intentioned.” I pretend the edges of my grief are self-defined edges, stopping at the perimeter of what I know and, sometimes more importantly, what I don’t.

~~~

My dear friend’s daughter will soon receive heart surgery, at the tender age of just a few months old. My grief sits at the place where joy gets buried, but not like a body: like a seed. I open my hands and catch as many seeds as possible, a little triangle of potential growth spilling over my thumbs and between my fingers. I hold what I can. I bury seeds in the ground. We bury things in the ground as a marker of peaceful liberation from this tangible world, and we bury things in the ground as a marker of wishing and welcoming more of them in. I am always wishing and welcoming in slightly more than what I can hold, and the joy spills over my thumbs and between my fingers. It’s okay: someone else will find it. Someone will be there to witness the accidental sprout that will result from the act of joy spilling over, my inability to contain it all myself. Someone might even experience it as if placed there just for them.

We bury things in the ground and the ground holds what it can. We give the buried things what they need: remembrance and water; ritual and oxygen; legacy and sunlight.

In this and many other ways, grief and joy are born of the same materials. The one needs the same stuff as the other.

We put things in the ground. We ask things to come back up toward us. We say goodbye. We say, welcome home, “home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people” (LeGuin).

The house is the container, but the contained family within it is the home, container and content being, in this case, nearly indistinguishable.

The heart is the container, but the contained joy within it is the home, the heart-home, and in this way each thing that matters to my heart the most becomes nearly indistinguishable from every other thing that matters. How beautiful: the man-made distinctions that a heart can melt.

~~~

I learn that my dear friend’s baby’s surgery will happen sooner than later, and my heart calls itself something else entirely.

I open my journal to a new page:

List of womb metaphors
To wear your womb on your sleeve
To spill your womb out on the page
To have your womb broken
To get to the womb of something

But the new page, in this case, is only a metaphor, consequence of technology’s grasp on everything I do. I close the document without hitting save. What didn’t I save? I grieve the distance between my ideas and what gets captured for posterity. I grieve the distance between who I am and how I seem. Between clouds, and cement.

Between my heart, and my head.

The brain sets us up to go distinction-first into the world, assessing our shortcomings and differences, as if this were the only way in which categories get born.

But the heart: it is curious. And it grows through inclusion and mistake—even the mistake that is carrying something too heavy and for too long. And the heart is a lion; a hand-made birthday gift; a gold-plated organ. It spills gets worn gets reached deep down into gets volleyed into the air. What I was trying to say all along is not that the womb can be so identical to the heart, but that the heart can be so identical to the shape of how we make things of value in this world. What we call them doesn’t matter so much as the act of calling them in.

~~~

Everything we call in will give transformative birth, sooner or later, to the same thing: grief.

“Love is like life—merely longer” (Emily Dickinson).

Of course it is shorter and smaller than all the very big things that are so much bigger than it. And the difference measured between those different sizes is called, “grief.” Result of all the places where love sneaks past the perimeter; where the heart scurries out of its smaller container and into a much bigger one.

~~~

Some days, my heart calls itself, “heart.” And some days my heart feels, and I mean this: tired. It is not invested in stories about war or competition. When placed under a microscope, it looks not unlike those wheat fields that from a distance seem to move like water. It grieves the stories about the hunters, and the bashing, and the singular unnatural men. And it gathers the stories about weavers menders bakers gardeners growers artists wishers and mothers: stewards of the many unique visions of the heroic womb.

Even containers need a place to gather, a place to have first come from.

And even the biggest, most insulated hearts need to be held.

~~~

My heart breaks—like a heat wave.

And now it is a ceramic plate on the kitchen floor.

And now it is the shape of the dry and hardened ground, splitting open. But the dirt inside is fertile. I call my heart something else entirely. I see shattering and ambiguity as gifts worth the grieving they will require of me. I see anything that needs mending as a place of possibility. What in the world might grow there next?