The fourth day of walking is often the hardest day of a long-distance walk. Suddenly, the body starts to believe you aren't going to stop. Maybe ever. It digs in its heels and huffs, "Whoa, there, Missy! I didn't sign up for this. Did you think to ask me if I wanted to walk a hundred miles in a week?"
It starts to whine and complain in the feet and knees. No matter how many times I do this distance, day four always gets me.
Rest and play
Luckily, about midway through today's ten miles of hills and cows, we stopped for an hour beside a bucolic stream, crossed by a bucolic bridge, and furnished with a perfect set of stream-side picnic tables. We pull out our art supplies to play in this agrestic setting.
The prompt at this stop was gifted by poet and artist Amelia Williams.
Do you remember making word catchers as a child? They are called by different names in different parts of the county or in other countries: cootie catchers, salt cellars, fortune tellers, chatterboxes, paku-paku, bada-bada, tippy tippy tappers . . .it's a long list. If you've forgotten how to fold them, click here for a step-by-step: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-make-a-cootie-catcher/.
A new twist on a child's game
Amelia has created a poetic twist on this old-time paper game. After we spent time coloring our catchers and folding them, she invited us to write down four words, then two words, each connected to the first word, and then write a line that reflected all three words. They were written into the catcher cells in a specific order (in lieu of the fortune-telling style words that most kids write into their catchers). Check out Amelia's website (WildInk.net) to see her beautiful, poetic catchers and her books, art, and poems.
Playing with our catchers, we discovered that we had each created 16 tiny poems. Here are just a few of the ones that fell from mine:
Cost
Transactions
Exchange
But, if you can't feel it, is it really there?
___________________
Lost
Hidden
Unseen
All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well
___________________
Found
Overjoyed
By surprise
I dig into the buried mystery
___________________
Given
Unasked
This gifting
May the circle be unbroken
A late-night write
Later in the evening, we returned to the topic of listening in our conversations around the table. I was reminded of one of my most memorable listening sessions, which I shared with my son a couple of years ago. I wrote down the memory that night. When I should have been sleeping, according to my whining body.
"Do we really have to do it again tomorrow," my body was incredulous.
"Yes," I told it. "You knew exactly what you were getting into."
Freedom with the Fetus
By Cheryl Murfin
For the last decade or so, I’ve watched my son put on his headphones and scroll the music app on his phone. When he does this, it’s clear he’s thinking. He's taking great care. It's sometimes a long process. But, eventually, a smile crosses his face, he hits play, and I watch him climb the hill that his neurodiversity but just plain life sometimes tosses up in front of him and disappears somewhere on the other side, where the high-volume crashing sounds between his ears is another world.
I used to think I could never join him in that place.
In fact, the first time I heard his favored musical genre streaming from his teenage bedroom, my knee-jerk reaction was that someone was dying in there. Once I realized it was music and not a murderer, my next thought was, how could anyone, especially my son, stand the screeching and screaming? I should explain here that as a kid, he hated loud noise. A loud bang down the street would instantly set him off, rocking and covering his ears.
Moreover, why would anyone listen to music from a band called Dying Fetus. Or Cannibal Corpse. Or Witch Vomit. Or pick your horrific image death metal band name. Despite my dismay, my kid wears these names on his all-black T-shirts, above his black butt-chained skinny jeans (two pair, rotated), every day. Minus the “Christmas picture” plaid shirt he deigns to wear when I beg him and the suit that gets dusted off for extreme family events like funerals, this is his entire wardrobe.
So I guess the answer to these and all my other questions is this: People evolve. Those living on the spectrum are not exceptions to that rule. Once upon a time, he had to listen to James Taylor to go to sleep. Now it’s anything by Slayer or Suffocation. Things change.
When he started listening to ear-shattering Death Metal at 15, I just plugged my ears—and checked in occasionally to make sure we weren't missing a dangerous mental health issue. I don’t believe in censoring music. Or anything else. And there was something in his face as the music pumped so loudly I could almost feel it in my body across the room, despite his wearing the headphones, that looked a lot like bliss.
He’s 26 now. And still, when he listens, his shoulders release. His lips curl up like a happy cat’s. His foot keeps a beat—if you can call it a beat. I’ll just say it: it's as if he’s just smoked a sizable bong, and it's just reaching its peak. Sometimes, he has just smoked a bong. But it’s the music that has him soaring, not the pot. It turns out that Witch Vomit is his spa music.
I’ll joke with my son: “I don’t get the attraction; explain it.”
He comes back with, “I don’t how John Denver still has a teary hold on you.” That from a one-time 6-year-old who loved “Annie’s Song.”
So, for a long time, I just watched him climb over the hill and disappear with the Fetus.
Until a few summers ago when I began not-so-covertly nudging him to expand his musical horizons. How about Jazz? It can be cool. Or Springsteen. He can be pretty loud.
“Mom,” he corrected me, without any of the impatience of my nagging, “I like a lot of different types of music. But have you ever really listened to death metal?”
“I can’t,” I admitted. “Apparently I’m too old, the lyrics and band names seem pretty offensive to me.”
“But you haven’t listened to it,” he pushed.
No. I really hadn’t. He had me.
He handed me his headphones and then spent a generous amount of time looking for just the right song. The smile appeared, and he clicked the volume button a couple of times. I secretly hoped it landed somewhere just above SILENT, but I trusted him to make the music experience I apparently needed.
“Just listen,” he admonished me. “Forget the words or feel the words; just don’t judge them.
He pushed play.
How do I describe the sound that slammed into my head? There was no doubt that the volume was fixed on HIGH.
My mind was instantly filled with dark colors— violent purple, blistering mustard, black hole black. I felt an adrenaline hit, and my heart raced like a greyhound. My mouth went dry. I thought for a second I was having a panic attack. And I didn’t even know the name of the song he picked.
And then suddenly, all that went away.
My body let go, and uncomfortable emotions, which I didn’t even know I was carrying, flooded out, it seemed, through my skin. Those sticky feelings softened and smoothed as they flowed out. My jaw went slack as I clambered over my son’s favorite hill and disappeared into that place where I was so sure I could not go with him.
I had a splitter. I returned his headphones, and he sent the song to my phone. I plugged in my own headphones, and we listened together.
Is there a word for the feeling that comes from seeing your kids, no matter how old they are, set free? And then feeling yourself the source of that freedom and understanding his experience?
Is there a word for that?
Our ears filled with a whole lot of “fuck”s and many, many words that will not be coming out of my mouth in this lifetime, words which I was sure I couldn’t handle hearing, especially in voices working hard to mimic that of Satan in The Exorcist film.
Instead it felt like a sound bath—just a pure and sacred as Tibetan gongs and singing bowls.
No wonder my son loves this stuff.
It won’t be in regular rotation on my playlists, but what a rush of all the human emotions. I get the climb now. I get where he goes.
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