Places Where We Meet: On the Page, in Living Rooms and in the Stars
A new year is an invitation
“Everything counts. The message is the world.” —William Stafford
Dear Writers,
Welcome to 2024 and all you wish to begin or renew or strengthen. A year, I learned long ago, is the length of time any astronomical object needs to complete its orbit. Mercury, closest to the sun in our own solar system, makes it way around in just 88 days. Neptune, at the furthest point out, takes 165 years to finish a cycle.
In light of those numbers, 365 days seems quite sensible to me and offers a reliable pause to consider what we might like to shuffle around in our lives, or pry up and shine the light on, or step into, or out of.
In 2023, I began to write again, a change that still feels miraculous to me. Most of what I’ve written so far have been journal entries and essay drafts that go on and on, until I finally make some painful snips and button them up. I wrote a few published pieces this year, too, including a blog entry for an organization called End Well. I’ll link to the blog piece below, after an introduction I wrote about it that grew to be a few times the length of the original entry (after not writing for so long, I seem to have a lot to say. Do you have a similar struggle with abundant verbiage? Or a different struggle?)
To each of my readers, from the depths of my writing heart: I notice you’re here. I appreciate you. I hope to read some of your own stories in the coming year. Any stuckness you may be experiencing with your writing, know I’ve probably experienced, too. I look forward to trying new things alongside you and supporting each other along the way.
Warmly,
Addie
When I’m not doing other earthly things like walking in fields with my kids and our big shaggy dog, or putting groceries into cupboards or making meals with the groceries, or trying to write in the early mornings, before anyone in my house is awake, I’m often giving massages to people under hospice care.
Massaging the dying reminds me of a college course I took in astronomy. The class was meant for students like me with little scientific aptitude. To increase interest in it, a wise academic thought to place the phrase ‘extraterrestrial life‘ in the course name, which worked on me, I signed right up. The possibility of aliens, of mystery lingering in the corners of any subject, was enough to pull me in.
What the class was really about was the basics of the solar system—that cold, airless, ever-expanding place that hovered above us while we shuffled into the cafeteria to eat frozen yogurt for dinner, struggled to write about Victorian literature, broke each other's 19 year-old hearts.
In extraterrestrial class, we learned how the universe began as a tiny fireball. We studied what a galaxy was: a collection of dust, gas, stars and solar systems gravity holds together. We learned our milky way is just one of billions of galaxies, and how the limit of what we can see up there measures an unthinkable 93 million light years.
Coming to know space in even the most elementary way, as we were—the incomprehensible math of it, the vastness, the years measured in millions and billions—impacted me here on earth. When I looked up at the sky and pictured our place among things, I wondered if humanity itself might be capable of moving beyond our sometimes small, reflexive ways of thinking, our tendency toward organizing people into categories and subcategories, human hierarchies. Briefly, I’d glimpse what might lay beyond our perpetual warring with each other, the pain and alienation it always wrought.
Space was deeply mysterious, it turned out, with or without aliens, and the very fact of it prompted new questions for me, bigger ones. How might we exist together differently? How could our entwined fates, as little dots on a slighter bigger dot of a planet, guide us toward more loving choices with ourselves, other fellow humans and earth itself?
Years later, when I began working as a massage therapist with dying patients, I was reminded of extraterrestrial class, of the new view it had shown me. In the living rooms and bedrooms of my clients, I had access to a similar kind of perspective. Our shared vulnerability was there all along, from birth, but in the muddle of life on earth, it was easy for our views to grow ever smaller, less expansive, less generous. This was true in my own life in so many ways.
Suddenly, the connections I got to make with my clients through simple touch and sometimes conversation cut across categories that might easily have separated us up until then: faiths, skin colors, languages, political tastes, economic brackets, ages, levels of isolation and connectedness. Here, I’d think, ironically, at the end, we can admit it: we’re all in this crazy thing together. At our most vulnerable moments, we can express our need for others.
Many of the elements that make up our bodies were created in stars over billions of years ago. I struggle to picture how it all began or really what any of that means. As I get older, mostly what I have are more questions accumulating. Just beyond the glimmering layers that give us color and texture, I do know we’re made of the same stuff and we began in the same place. Whether we can see it or not, our fates are inseparably linked as we spin through the puzzle and wonder of space, making 365 day trips around the sun together, each new one an offering, fresh and unwritten.
End Well Stories: Touching Life
November 29, 2023
by Addie Hahn, Hospice Massage Therapist
My client lay under a pale duvet in her bedroom at the top of a creaking staircase in an old Victorian house. Her smile was both warm and weary as she took my hand and told me where she was hurting: her back and shoulders. I pulled a wooden chair up beside her and began to feel my way along the sides of her spine. My goal as a hospice massage therapist is always the same: to assess how I can bring comfort through touch to the person in front of me in the midst of wherever they find themselves.
Most of us have complicated relationships to our bodies long before we navigate our final illness. There’s nothing simple about what we carry with us in our aching feet and tired shoulders—but touch is among the simplest things we have to offer one another. If we’re lucky, we’re held as babies moments after being born. From our earliest days, we learn that love is rooted in our physical sensations the same way the whole constellation of feelings are, including hope, gratitude and grief.
When I tell people what I do for a living, they often respond with sympathy. “That must be so sad!” they say. What surprises me still, after seven years, is that I don’t find the work overwhelmingly sad or at least exclusively so. Instead, the job feels deeply grounded in real, moment to moment experiences that reveal the full color of what it means to have lived in this world, which is never just one thing.
Each day massaging my clients is its own tiny universe, unknown until it reveals itself to me. In illness, when many of the social conventions of daily life have fallen away, I find a different, more direct form of communication can happen, made all the more impactful because I’m touching people’s physical bodies. Stepping into clients’ living spaces to work with them at an often vulnerable time always feels like a privilege—I get to play a small part in helping to normalize our enduring human need for care and connection.
Addie, you have amazing perspective, connecting the life of the universe, "the incomprehensible math of it," with your intimate, "deeply grounded" connection to another person. Thank you for sharing this.
Love this, Addie:
"Instead, the job feels deeply grounded in real, moment to moment experiences that reveal the full color of what it means to have lived in this world, which is never just one thing."
And, your final words:
"I get to play a small part in helping to normalize our enduring human need for care and connection."
I just love how you explain with humility and vulnerability that we are all human in need of each other, and each moment gathers together to reveal--as you beautifully put it--the "full color" of our lives. I love that you get to be a part of someone's "full color" as you gently touch them and make a connection with them at the end of their lives. It's quite beautiful how you explained that in this article, and pulls at my heart in ways I don't even have words for. Thanks for sharing Addie!