Pull the cord, see what happens
Gripping, losing, + finding connection
Hi friends,
My extra-slim tinsel Christmas tree has been up for almost a month now. I wrapped the lights expertly and plugged them right in. I’m that guy now, and I love it.
Every morning I can’t wait to wake up so I can sit in front of it in the dark with my coffee. Hey, let me have this. I need as much supportive, vibe-y ambience in my life as possible these days — I we all do — so it was a primal act of self-preservation.
A few weeks ago I spent the weekend in communion with people drawn into sacred murkiness just like me. Birth workers and death workers, otheryns, and witches (literally) exploring what it means to step “outside ordinary reality” to serve at the veil of the liminal.
I’ve written before about my ongoing death study, which really began as soon as I started trying to become pregnant with my son. Get closer to death in order to get closer to birth was my theory, I suppose.
It might seem heavy, and it is. But heavy is true. And for me, studying and dwelling in heavy spaces of loss, grief, metamorphic transition, or death is the most pungent way to get clear and committed to living well. It is grounding. These are the truest, most certain parts of life. I’ve recently completed my certification to become a miscarriage + bereavement doula.
This particular weekend training was for those who offer psychosocial or other support (logistical, ritual, medical) to folks navigating the ingress and egress of life: death and birth. If you are to serve as a lighthouse in such foggy, fragile, holy spaces, there is a deep integrity, a fearlessness, and a hollow-ness that must abide. You must intentionally un-thether yourself from your ordinary reality to be so; once the event is over, with care and intention you must plug back in. Reground, come back to earth.
The cord is key.
It was a beautiful though intense way to spend a weekend, and putting up a Christmas tree at the end of it was the salve I needed. November was a month of grief. Some months become grief months. Though I’m not sure if it’s because many losses happen all at once, or it’s that we can only notice the totality of them once in a while.
I have been thinking about cords, tethers, connecting wires, draw strings, and pull cords. All that binds and connect us, plugs us in, keeps us from hurtling off into the deep, and which strangles and hold us back. A cord audit.
No matter how much the human race advances technologically, we will never escape cords. Cords will have the last laugh.
While most headphones are now cordless and chargers are wireless, now we have cars we gotta plug in. Even “wireless” chargers require a minimum amount of skin-to-skin contact with your device to be any help at all, and you know there’s a wire snaking to the wall somewhere, making it all happen.
My family’s first cordless phone was freedom! Omnipotence. Talk wherever you want, as long as you want, about whatever you want! This is the 90’s, baby. Cool power embodied in a one pound angular gray receiver whose chrome antenna extended lithely upward *zsssipp* to show the whole world how powerful you were.
But if you left the general vicinity of the receiver’s dock. static would set in. While true, you’re no longer battling a tangled helix phone cord, perhaps worse, you’re in a boxing match with your own delusions about power and freedom. An invisible collar reminding you that connection requires proximity to a touchstone. And while proximity is subjective, you’ll know when it’s been lost. Limits are everywhere. Can you hear me now?
With a physical cord, though, there is something tangible, stable, reliable. You can see that it’s actually plugged in and that no one has chewed through any part of it. You can see the length and quality of the cord. It offers you the latitude it does and that’s that.
When I was pregnant with my son, I became mildly obsessed with a fear that the umbilical cord might get wrapped around his neck. It’s not that wild fear because it does happen often: 20-34% of births have a nuchal cord (as it’s called) though it’s usually not a cause for concern. It is less like a noose and more like a squid, although of course tragic accidents do occur.
The umbilical cord is gelatinous, slick, and highly mobile. It is also the coolest, most important, and most high tech of cords that we’ll ever encounter in our lifetime. Now this is a cord you really need. This is a cord no wireless connection can even touch.
The umbilical cord is an entire human’s organ system stretched out into a single magical, blubbery rope. Inside, one beautiful vein carries oxygenated blood and nutrients to a growing human while two lovely arteries carry de-oxygenated blood and waste away from them. All of this hard work is wrapped in tough, durable jelly.
Look down at your belly button right now to remember this is where your very own magic cord was plugged in. And on the other end, your placenta! Damn, what a gift. We will ever be as cool as when we were forming in the womb?
My son weaned last month. It has been a most profound and grief-filled, alchemical shift of an experience. One that I could not have prepared for nor fully ever comprehended until I actually traversed it. Just like death. Just like birth.
“You’re free!” my pediatrician said blithely, when I told her. I winced. I didn’t want to be free. I mean I do in some ways but not in others, ya know? I want to pick and choose my cords, what connects me to another and perhaps “ties me down,” and decide when I want to change my mind too.
What feels comforting one day might feel claustrophobic all of a sudden. We can retain the right to audit our cords and decide what stays and goes.
For me, breastfeeding has been the most healing experience of my life. There is a literal continuity between your body and the little body you’re feeding. They inform you and you inform them. What you eat they eat, and they tell your body what they need. It is absolutely wild. As I told a friend, I think it might be the one and only time I have ever felt fully enough. What a gift.
I didn’t want to be free of all of that— of that connection, or of that version of myself. But when a cord is comprised of the relationship between two living, growing beings, it will only last so long. The underlying connection abides, haunts, comforts me. I trust in that.
Matrescence is nothing but constant joys and losses, in my experience. Every day I’m celebrating and mourning, throwing parties and funerals. The incessancy is amazing and exhausting. Like standing directly in a waterfall. The first cord that’s cut is the literal one, the umbilical. Now a new earthling must try and breathe and function (somewhat) on their own in the world.
The next cords that are unplugged, cut, disconnected, or simply disintegrate are … too many to count. They happen daily, it seems. Maybe moment to moment.
Every change is predicated by a cord shift of sorts. And it’s never a single causality. Rather, like a packed extension cord, an unplugging has numerous follow-on effects. Losses have byproduct losses, like a terrible phone tree.
Are we ever really ready to let something go, if it meant something to us? I don’t know.
Grief, which we have all experienced, which is ever-present with us, can be understood as a fullness, not a lack. Grief is a fullness and grief is a portal because it offers a more vivid entrance into our world. Grief is a cord of sorts. It is evidence of connection, of love and indelible memory. Here’s a sweet conversation where actor Andrew Garfield explains grief to Elmo on Sesame Street.
“There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”
- Francis Weller, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”
We are fast approaching the time of “wintering,” or perhaps some of you are already in it. The ending of the calendar year is a natural time for slowing, plants tell us.
This week is my last plant-inspired garden meditation of the year. I’ve been holding these special sessions for about two years now. Rain, shine, hot heat, chill, we’re there with the plants, breathing. The last few months of meditations have been held at evening time, as the sun sets and moon rises, set by a little fire which I tend to whilst I offer guidance. Being with plants as they go to sleep is amazing.
The plants remind us that we are always rooted and held, even when we don’t feel or remember it. The plants also remind us that there is a time for dormancy just as there is a time for perseverance and active growth. But dormancy doesn’t mean pause, it means slowing. Growth is still there. Photosynthesis still occurs. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.
When days feel heavy, when the sun sets early, even when we are bone tired or freezing cold, we must still keep going. There is always a need for a get-up-and-go, even in the slowing. Still gotta take the dog out. Still gotta get out of this warm bed. Still gotta send that email.
Where and how do you find it? The spark, the ignition, the pull start to your engine.
When I was a kid, my older sister mowed our lawn for pocket money. She had an athletic build and a confident air, and I’d watch her criss-cross the yard expertly. It was a push mower with a pull cord start. Its internal combustion engine sputtering on after just one or two strong, graceful pulls which made her look totally badass.
When she left for college, I was bequeathed the chore— a great financial and coolness opportunity. Unfortunately, unlike my sister who lifted, I had actual linguine strands for arms. Starting the mower was near-impossible.
My large left foot up on the mower, right food grounded, my bony frame folded up with purpose like one of those wooden figures artists use to sketch from. I’d examine the T-bar handle in the palm of my hand and slowly pull out the cord, my nemesis. The same movement done slowly was impotent, but performed at the perfect pitch would get the whole thing going. Zero or hero, those are the options.
People make a lot of fuss about not being a “quitter” or about the importance of following through. I get it. But getting something started is…tough and magic.
I found someone named Dug at small engine repair shop called Dizzy Lizzy’s in Bognor, UK who helped me *start* to understand how a pull cord motor works. Worth watching at least a few minutes especially if you never watch this kind of thing?? And yes it’s Dug, not Doug. Brilliant to have that past tense verb as a name. The elements and the way they’re assembled are rather straightforward. But the way they work together to unleash power is a sum greater than the parts.
As the year winds down in order for a new one to wind back up, an invitation to you to pause for a cord audit. A commitment to noticing, or untangling, or perhaps unplugging and then plugging back in (the most powerful reset of all!).
I think about the relationships in my life — energetic or emotional cords of sorts — that have prevailed, dropped away, or appeared anew through various circumstances. The dear ones I wish I could see or say something to, or speak to more often, but for one reason or another cannot. I love you, I miss you, I’m sorry. I sit and locate my connection to them, sometimes in the grief of their loss, and feel calmer feeling it is still there. I think about my cord connection to self: hard-earned and frayed, but beloved and pulsating with strong currents. I think about all the bad things that can happen when I lose that connection. And about the power coiled inside of me like a pull-start engine. Only I can find the right pitch to unleash it, I got the get-up-and-go.
The truth is that some cords give you energy, others drain you of it, and still others need you to lend your force in collaboration with it to get the whole thing roaring. What’s going on with you? Loosening, lassoing, letting go. No cord, however long or strong, is without it’s limits, or is meant to be plugged in forever.
Love ya.