We House Worlds

why use a butcher knife when we could gather bouquets instead?

*This article was published in my monthly column in the Village’s September issue. If you’re local to the Kennebunk, ME area, go grab a physical copy!

Photo by James Baldwin on Unsplash

One of the most delightful facts about my life right now is that I’m in a writing group with a handful of other local women.

Our times together usually go like this:

Everyone brings a piece of writing to share, and then we take turns reading it aloud, offering and receiving feedback, laughing, wiping our eyes, perhaps pouring another half-glass of wine when we get up to stretch our legs.

The group has nourished me in at least a thousand ways, but what has stood out the most has been the stunning realization that each of us is filled to the gills with fascinating experiences, questions, worries, optimism, pain, surprises, and love. In short—with humanity.

We’re all different ages, our backgrounds vary, I don’t know how anyone votes, and we haven’t discussed religion. It doesn’t matter; the stories we share supersede these things. I know to the outsider’s eye we’d just look like a bunch of average women—the kind you’d see in Hannaford and say hello to, then go about your day.

But as I sat in our last meeting and looked around the group, I saw the outline of each woman, yes, but I also saw the flowers and ancestors and hidden memories and hard-earned truths and yet-unwritten fantasies that seemed ready to burst forth from each of them. Unable to stop myself from sounding like a romantic Whitman¹, I declared with wide-open jaw: “We house worlds.”

I was struck by the fact that, as each of us drives about this world in our cars or selects bananas at the store, as we pick out ice cream at the scoop shop or pack up lunch for our kids, our hands and legs are animated by souls that hold such an accumulation of history, wisdom, and lived experience that if we were to unpack it from ourselves and let it loose around us, we’d fill whole rooms and houses and towns with the stuff.

Each of us is a fascination.

I am convinced that you could fall into the pools of any one of our spirits and come up for air hours later, having only gotten the faintest taste of what we contain. And it makes me think:

Could some of our most enchanting and satisfying work be to dive into the people around us and learn to see them, know them, explore them, appreciate them? Our culture often paints the picture that there is some cosmic butcher knife, cutting through humanity and making people fall on one side or another—apart. Separating with such decisive slices that what’s been severed can never be put back together again.

But I cheerfully reject that notion.

I think humanity would be better considered a garden—each of us a colorful plot that springs forth all sorts of lively oddities and wonders. Why use a butcher knife when you could gather bouquets instead?

Of course, in this present age it is so tempting to look to the digital world to gather our bouquets. We can go onto TikTok and find recipes for dinner, after all. We can build communities of like-minded people on Instagram, and we can experience the world through someone else’s eyes via the news outlets.

But from my time sitting in our writing group, I’ve begun to realize that any connection technology can offer seems to be just a shadow of what living-breathing relationships can give. It is there in our little group—in the presence of people I could reach out and touch—that I feel a deep settledness in my soul saying, “Yes, yes. This is the stuff. This is the stuff of life.”

I’m learning that I don’t want my stories coming to me from a curated reel on Instagram. I want to watch the way someone’s lips curl at the remembrance of an old lover.

I don’t want to find my recipes on a celebrity’s website. I want them to come from someone’s pantry, its 5-star rating evidenced by the flour and fingerprints stuck to the worn-out ingredient list.

I don’t want to have only people who think-act-look-feel-dream-worry like me popping up onto my feed. I want to sit in a room with people who house worlds inside of them, and then have the honor of opening the door to their plot of the garden and gathering armfuls of bouquets to bring home with me.

This time of year always feels like an invitation to reset, to consider what’s been sown and what’s worth reaping come harvest time. And so as we move back towards the rhythms of the school year and the haunting-beautiful whisper of cold, what I carry with me is the dazzling warmth of community life. I want to learn to curl around it, to let it warm me when the nights get longer and the snow begins to spit and fly.

I look at my phone and realize it is an inanimate object: anything it promises is only a shadow of what we long for most. It is the act of relational living—of existing within flesh-and-blood communities—that is going to nourish and sustain us. And it’s the willingness to go exploring in others’ worlds that will fill our lives with bouquets.

1. “(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Walt Whitman, from his poem Song of Myself, 51