Stay Tender

The argument for staying soft and porous in a dangerous world

A few years ago, just before she became poet laureate of the United States, I was given fifteen minutes to interview Ada Limón for Stonecoast MFA about her book, The Hurting Kind. It was an impossible job. Fifteen minutes to ask the exact right questions, to pierce through the pretense of what had brought us together (her upcoming appearance at USM) and try and touch some kind of heart.

For me, every interview is a practice in deep listening. I’m cracking jokes and putting people at ease and writing down what they say, sure. But what I’m really doing is listening for the truth. Not the words they’re speaking, necessarily, but the universal thing that hovers under the surface of every conversation. The place where the script runs out. Getting there often takes time.

After my first two questions, I ditched my list of questions and listened to the air between us instead. What I remember most was how easily we both laughed. How the things Ada said were, remarkably, things I’d been thinking about, too. We talked about the kind of self-permission it takes for a writer to be wholly herself on the page. We talked about surrender. We talked about long walks, and leaving space for what the world wants to say.

“There are so many of us that are tender to the world and receptive to wonder,” she said. “We’re porous. Beauty hurts. Attachment hurts. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s a way that we are moved and pierced by the world.”

I think about that still. Porous.

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In order to write, I have to go through periods of living in my body. That’s where I’ve been. Out, dissolving myself into spring and summer, leaving space for what the world wants to say. Right now, I’m writing this to you over a hotspot from a little rustic cabin on Norton Island, and the world sounds an awful lot like the hungry mosquito who just got in. At five a.m. it sounded like a chugging lobster boat. Yesterday, it sounded like loon song.

I was telling Rosy, one of the visionary supporters of the arts who, along with her late husband, Steve Dunn, founded the Norton Island Residency for Writers & Artists, about the other day when I was lying in bed with a book and listening to the raindrops on the cabin skylight and my body was so full of rest and quiet and reading and rain and it felt like so much love that tears came to my eyes and I whispered, thank you.

“You’re so tender,” Rosy said.

I opened my mouth to argue but then closed it because she’s right. I have never considered myself someone who is easily undone. But you know what, maybe I am. And maybe tender is the point. Maybe it’s the work.

Tender, this spring, looked like paddling 100 miles in whitewater kayaks with my photographer friend, Andy Gagne, and a small team of environmentalists on a source to sea expedition from Bethel, Maine via the Crooked River to Casco Bay. We traced the journey of the water with our bodies, and are preparing to tell the story for the sake of clean drinking water and river protections. I wonder-cried at the eclipse. Prayed to the red-tailed hawks that kept flying in front of my windshield. Got tipsy on green maple buds, dandelions, early waterfalls. Sang harmony, wrote slowly.

This summer, tender was filling my family’s kitchen with cooking and warmth while my mom recovered from hip surgery. I said yes to guiding a last-minute trip to Iceland, rejoiced that I could be freezing in June, marveled at waterfalls and rainbows and a landscape that looked like Mars, noticed the extra pudge starting to gather around the bottom of my belly and thanked the Arctic char, the Icelandic lamb, the lemon and yogurt and fresh rye bread, the hands that made it so. I offered support freely. Sang in a bar. Kissed somebody new. A couple somebodies. Praised my body for carrying me over mountains, down backroads, back and forth across frisbee fields in the hot sun. When time moved too fast I sat in an Adirondack chair in the backyard and let it run through me until I could stand up and keep going again.

Staying tender can also be painful. It means trembling at the news because of the genocide in Gaza, the killing and killing, the lost humanity, the enormous collective grief, and I know that if I look directly it will swallow me for some time, but it’s the least I can do, look. Witness. It means waking up in Iceland to the news that my country’s highest court is trying to crown a king, has made it legal to arrest people for sleeping on the street, has left women’s bodies dangling in the balance, and slipping out silently to weep by a waterfall before I meet my clients so that I can meet them at all. It means looking at the blue Atlantic and feeling the loss of a friend from Albany who loved that ocean, who believed in me so strongly that sometimes when I faltered in my writing, when I wished for a life that was safer and saner, Dennis’ faith in me was the only thing that kept me true. It means that when my sister and I watched a deer, struck by a car going 75, fly through the air and fall twisted to the pavement, after checking on the driver I got back in the car and cried for the deer because he was dying alone and nobody was thinking of him, because somebody needed to.

I believe that the urge to protect, to armor ourselves, is what will destroy us. If the American people elect Donald Trump to the presidency this November, it will be a failure of tenderness. A failure to feel what’s at stake with more than our minds. A failure to let grief and joy into our bodies in great enough measure to know the truth. I believe the only way into—and through—this moment is, as terrible as it sounds, to let it in. I also believe that we are made for this.

Sometimes, art is just living in your body. It’s being here. And trusting that when you come back, you’ll have something that wants you to say it.

Norton Island, Maine

“Stay Gentle”
by Brandi Carlile
From the seagulls, the lobster boats, the flies, the forest, and me.