Journey to Jupiter: Five Things
Between Two Eclipses
Last time: A Spooky Season Reading List
“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”—Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
This month, during the time between eclipses, I attended the Journey to Jupiter writing retreat led by Julia F. Greenand Ralph Walker.
I haven’t written a 5 Things piece in a while, and this seems the best way for me to process the days I spent writing in the Poconos with a new creative community and no cell service or Wi-Fi.
1. The Bardo
Eclipse Season is not something I have ever paid attention to until I was in this one. I didn’t know that eclipses came in pairs. And I didn’t know that the period between them is referred to as the Bardo. As Jeanna Kadlec writes, “This is the Bardo, after all: the time between eclipses, when we are at risk of being lulled into a false sense of ease. The energy is still churning beneath the surface, and it’s all about power and perspective.”
Waking in Camp Zeke felt easier than my usual mornings. No lesson plans to write, no cat litter to change, no field trip permission slips to sign—just wind and lake and fall colors like we haven’t yet seen in the south this fall. A beautiful Bardo. A perfect place to land for a while.
Without my usual distractions (phone, TV, internet—I didn’t even bring a book to read), I let my thoughts jump from one image to the next. One list I made shows the connections my brain tried to make on the last day:
· High Priestess
· Persephone
· Underworld
· Undersea
· Wintering
· Hibernation
The High Priestess was the card I pulled each morning no matter how much I shuffled my tarot deck. The Undersea is a shout out to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. “Wintering” is Sylvia Plath: “This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.” I was thinking of a thin veil being lifted between one world and the next.
What I mean is that even though the season didn’t change while we were at Camp Zeke, magic happened in the in-between space as if we were between seasons. By magic I mean something I can’t yet put into words.
2. One Thing I Miss
I’m not sentimental, not really, but I have a saved voicemail of my father’s voice wishing me happy birthday the year before he died. He usually forgot my birthday, remembering the month but never the exact day and he had called that year right before midnight to let me know he hadn’t forgotten me.
I listen to that message on my birthday each year, in the morning before I go to work. It isn’t about missing his voice. Rather, it’s about no longer spending the day, like I used to when he was alive, wondering if he was going to call.
The thing I really miss is the way my dad used to say, “hello gorgeous.” We didn’t see each other often, didn’t talk on a regular basis throughout my life, but when we did, he always said those words. Hello Gorgeous. I understand I was the only one he greeted this way and anyway, there’s no one else still alive who can prove to me otherwise.
“I’m afraid no one is ever going to say hello gorgeous to me again.” I said this to my husband after my father died. My voice broke in the middle of the sentence.
3. If I’m Not Reading
If I’m not reading, I’m not writing. This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about myself and my writing process. They go hand in hand. And both of my hands are always filled with books.
If I’m not writing, I’m talking about books. I’ve got a good job for that kind of thing. And to borrow from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, my bookish life, even when I’m not reading, is a delight.
Like how I read This Boy We Made by Taylor Harris and then a student asked to borrow it because it sounded like a book she needed in her life. Delight.
And then I read Congratulations, the Best is Over by R. Eric Thomas and texted a friend to see if she’d heard of it. She knows the author. Delight.
Then a friend gave me a book by Ursula K. Le Guin (No Time to Spare) which was a delight because my son has just started reading Le Guin. As a thank you, I texted that same friend a poem (as one does). I hope you enjoy it, too. It’s a poem we may need right now:
“Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye
Currently reading Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, I am filling a hole I didn’t know I had in my reading life.
Currently reading Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, a book in which a father greets his four daughters by saying “Hello Beautiful,” I’m realizing how much I miss my dad.
4. Hello Gorgeous
“We are here to keep watch, not to keep,” Kathryn Schulz writes in her breathtaking memoir, Lost & Found. It a book about the loss of her father and also about finding love, the place in between. The “&.”
I had already read these words, already cried over them once, months before in preparation for the writing retreat. But when I heard them read out loud during a session on catharsis (the narrative kind), I forgot to breathe all over again.
We had just finished a period of reflecting on our obsessions and fears, the mysteries and secrets that lived inside our writing. I had listed every topic from addiction to Huntington’s Disease to family dynamics. I felt controlled and efficient. I had a list. I did the homework. Catharsis complete.
The thing about books, though, is that they live inside us. Days and months and years later. As I sat in the cold, maybe haunted auditorium of Camp Zeke, all of Kathryn Schulz’s memoir flooded through me.
“We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”
Oh, I thought, my throat swollen with impending tears. I forgot to write “grief” on my list. You know, even though I have a whole Substack named Mourning Pages.
As I made my way to the bathroom so no one could see me cry, my red eyes weren’t fooling anyone. Grief. Here it comes, I thought. And when I looked at my splotchy skin and my trembling lips in the mirror, I surprised myself by whispering, “Hello Gorgeous.”
In the moment, I felt calmed, but only later would I get it. Hello Gorgeous. I never needed to hear anyone else say it to me again. I only ever needed to say it to myself.
5. Survival is Insufficient
After the retreat, at airport in Scranton, PA I found that I was the only person in the whole terminal. It was one of those eerie moments where I imagined I was the only person alive after some big apocalypse. Do other people entertain these strange scenarios or just writers? I thought about Station Eleven. And then my immediate next thought was, "Oh no—gremlins." Meaning the gremlins of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. I could feel them waiting there.
I was so overwhelmed in that moment that I wanted to email everyone from the retreat for support, to warn them that that the gremlins were already hanging out, waiting to nip at our ankles, but when I reached into my bag to grab my computer, I found a paper airplane from Camp Zeke's theater instead. I had stared at this paper airplane, trapped up above the stage curtains, leftover from some summer camper, for the first two days. Finally, someone knocked it down and it became part of the retreat experience.
On one wing, I had written "survival is insufficient." On the other wing, someone else had written, "Penny, you are a writer."
And just like that, the gremlins went back to Dunkin Donuts or wherever they hang out. It’s not that I need anyone to tell me I’m a writer. This fact about me is often one of the only things I feel confident about. I could stand to say it to myself more, though, to whisper it to my reflection, to hear my own voice.
At the airport, holding my paper airplane, I was yet again between two places. Between home and this almost-indescribable experience. Between grief and joy. Between two eclipses. And and and.
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