Posted on by Amy Suardi

Dangerously Alive

To practice for their summer trip to the national parks, Sofia and her best friend decided to hike Old Rag Mountain. Nine miles around and 2,680 feet up.

On her day off work at the bakery, they drove with new driver’s licenses to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. 

“Shortcutting is dangerous,” said a wooden sign at the base. They trekked over needle ice. They climbed traprock staircases, they overtook ice rivers.

On that day cut with a diamond sun, Sofia had no time to stream The Great British Baking Show or to set silverware on folded napkins before dinner. She was crawling up billion-year-old boulders with two arms and two legs.

It was dark when the front door opened and the night air brought her in. As she untied her shoes, she swiped through glowing images on her phone. Shoulders resting against rock walls, pink noses, clouds of effort. Her eyebrows were rainbows. And her face was lit from the inside.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

Sometimes We Need a Crisis

I barely recognize the version of myself that existed before this pandemic. That particular patching together, that paper maché person collaged from all I had learned and feared. A marionette acting as if every day were an audition to get into Life.

“In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.”

—Albert Einstein

A year ago this week, our crisis arrived. On March 11, 2020, a global calamity of massive proportions was declared. We are still in the midst of this pandemic, with rolling lockdowns and outbreaks flaring up around the world, states and countries arguing over what needs to be done and who is at fault, industries crumbling, livelihoods lost forever, and the weak and the poor being trodden down even more.

When you’re in the middle of a crisis, it can be hard to accept a statement such as this one: “Sometimes the world needs a crisis,” the title of a Brookings report from April 2017. The report shows how crises throughout history, typically viewed as dangerous and wasteful, have also been catalysts for solutions and innovating, especially when conventional ways are challenged. Disparate groups have come together in crisis, bonded by their collective suffering, cooperating to create new systems. Danger also triggers the flow of communal adrenaline, focusing minds on what needs to be done.

A crisis is both danger and opportunity and we have experienced all during this pandemic. Shared vulnerability has pulled us together, but fear, suspicion of others, and restrictions on personal freedom have pulled us apart. In our defenselessness, we looked to our governments for help, who either gained or broke our trust. When things fell apart, we saw where our institutions were corrupt, and yet this awareness made us more willing to fight for change. 

I have seen this phenomenon play out inside the microcosm of my own self. When the crisis hit, I was terrified of losing the only world I knew. I was afraid of breaking until I didn’t know the shape of me, until I spilled everywhere. Like regimes resistant to change, I didn’t want to let go and find new ways of being. 

But danger woke me up and reminded me I was alive. Fear blasted away all those pretend stories in my mind and made me focus on what was real. The past was disappearing fast, the future was blank, and all I had was now. 

We think of light as healing, but the blackness nurtured me. In quarantine, I was forced to feel my own feelings, instead of going out interpreting others’. Unable to keep searching everywhere for the key, I was forced to leave the keyhole empty. I was forced to stay, when I wanted to go. 

With brutal accuracy, the virus showed me that I am not in control. When everything falls away, you find out who you are. 

“Global crises that crush existing orders and overturn long-held norms…can pave the way for new systems, structures, and values to emerge and take hold,” the Brookings report says. “Without such devastation to existing systems and practices, leaders and populations are generally resistant to major changes and to giving up some of their sovereignty to new organizations or rules.”

This is a message of hope. And yet another kind of threat awaits us when we emerge from crisis. When immediate danger passes, we often wander back to our separate spheres, our private battles, the ways we numb our feelings so we can get on with life.

The pandemic is not over, but with danger receding, I can feel all the useless terrors returning. I feel myself constructing my armor again, pasting layer over layer around me, protecting me from enemies that don’t exist and judgments that have not been uttered. 

Lacking a disaster to confront, “I” have become the problem that needs solving. The pulling-in effect spurred by crisis has dwindled, and now I feel a war brewing inside me, between the parts of me that don’t agree, the oppressors and the oppressed. Without the fear of imminent death, I have to fight to stay awake, to keep my heart open, to pay attention. The body wants to slip back into comfort, ease — sleep.

When 10, or 20, or even 50 years have passed, we who have been through this pandemic will know each other by our scars. I hope my scar will always remind me of the wound that healed me, the cut that went so deep to touch that place that connects me to every person, plant, and animal, stone, stream, and cloud. The part of me that sees in every human being a friend, teacher, a child. 

I am not courageous. I am terrified every day. But my wish is that I will confront the private crises of my life, the ones I suffer alone, that rip into the curve of my emotional globe, with a sliver of recognition. A gleam of insight from this gash. I hope I will remember that old orders must die into the eternal river of life. And from the greatest pain comes the greatest love.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

The Mourning Dove Tells Me

I hear the coo of a mourning dove,
swaying as a porch swing does 
in the breeze by itself,
and I remember this time last year.
Spring was coming, 
but we didn’t predict 
the total eclipse.

I want to hug the person I was, 
scared and so lost.
To mother the child
when a bosomy clasp 
in a rocking chair
could still ease the pain.

In late February, 
crystalline light outlines 
the cypress fronds, 
shards of ice lose their edge, 
green points push 
out of the brown, 
and I want to run outside 
like a child 
who sees a friend at the door.

Dare I trust spring again?
The vaccine is here, but 
three thousand died every day
last month. 
In Los Angeles, funeral homes
rent refrigerated trucks 
to hold all the bodies,
and in Maryland, graves 
can’t be dug fast enough 
with shovels and backhoes,
so they must lay dynamite.

Conspiracies keep felling minds,
and the virus keeps morphing 
into new mutations
in South Africa, Britain, and Brazil.

The song of the mourning dove
swaying up, up and then down
seems to tell me,
Cry for all we have endured, 
for how strong you’ve been.

John James Audubon

Let the knots unloose,
the rain soak into you.
Let the ice thaw, and
the sun light up 
every one of your fronds.

Allow the wind to decide 
what branches need to fall
and which can still point to the sky.

Plant your feet deep in the ground,
and let every tendril take up 
the fertile funeral of last year’s loss.

Like the rain that has seen tragedies 
and majesties that you will never know,
you too must return.

Those choirs of geese 
making giant arrows in the sky,
those woodpeckers drumming,
these snowdrops blooming —
they are here to lead you out.

Receive, let go, fly.
This is what it feels like to be alive.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

A Rainbow Puddle Under the Fig Tree

Diana and her new friend 
make hearts out of snow 
with plastic molds
my sister mailed
from Arizona.

They press a heart 
onto the tip
of a fig tree branch,
decorate it with 
food coloring —
red and yellow,
green and blue.

Like a sno-cone 
once bright 
with syrup,
the heart
begins to pale, 
and drip by drip,
onto the sidewalk 
a rainbow spills.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

Broken Macarons

acqua_colore/Shutterstock

Caramel, mango, 
coffee, and raspberry. 
Broken macarons sit 
in a clear plastic box 
on the top shelf of our fridge. 

Cinnamon and vanilla, 
pumpkin and pistachio,
they’re sold for two dollars a piece
at the bakery where Sofia works.
But broken, they are worthless. 

She rises early to ring up 
quiche and almond cakes, 
twists and espresso
at the bakery in the mall. 
Freshman classes are virtual,
so she’s saving up for a car 
and a trip across the country.

The tooth first touches a stiff veil
like the crust over snow at night.
Then chewy meringue surrenders 
into a soft heart
before it melts everywhere. 

An exact degree of humidity is required 
for satiny but strong domes, 
rough but frilly crowns.
The softness of the macaron’s collapse
equal to the precision of its construction.

On the days when Sofia 
comes home, extracting 
from a crinkled white bag
a few broken macarons,
she smiles as if to say, 
What misfortune and what luck.

She adds them to the 
plastic box in the fridge — 
chocolate macarons filled with chocolate ganache, 
lemon with lemon curd buttercream, 
apricot with apricot jam.

“You can each choose one,”
she tells her brothers,
extending the open box to them 
in the middle of their Nerf gun fight 
as if offering bonbons to princes.

Crushed, cracked, or chipped, 
our macarons will never 
surprise a dinner party hostess or
commemorate an anniversary. 

They are eaten with 
grubby hands that have 
just formed snowballs 
from sidewalk slush. 
Popped into mouths between 
handfuls of corn chips 
and streams of potty words.
Appreciated if not for the form,
then for the content: 
“Passionfruit is so good!” Luke says.
“It’s like sweet and sour!”

Macarons were born 
as dollops of almond meringue
in the monasteries of medieval Venice. 
Priest’s bellybuttons 
they were called 
when Catherine de’ Medici 
married King Henry II and
brought them to France.
The Parisians transformed bellybuttons
into three-layer pastry shop tartlets.

When Sofia first mentioned 
macarons, 
I had the vague sense 
that I had missed 
some chic fad.
Perhaps out of rebellion 
for being left out, 
or a lack of respect 
for broken things, 
I ate my first one 
as if it were an ordinary cookie 
that thought very highly of itself.

“I’m grateful for macarons,” 
Diana said one evening
when I tucked her in.
Now I try to eat each one
knowing how hard they were to make,
how delicate and once beautiful.
And how the baker, knowing this too,
keeps making them again and again.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

In the Abundant Heart of Winter

In the heart of winter, sadness has given way to acceptance, and even gratitude. After the quarantines and social distancing of summer, the arrival of winter had felt like a grim sentence. Yet even within the suffering and anguish of the world, there have been gifts.

Once a year in my former life, I would drive for hours to some remote lodge where phone calls and newsletters and signup sheets couldn’t reach me. The flames inside took several days to die down.

I spent hours without talking, I took walks in the woods, I went to bed early.

I always arrived confused and broken. Fooled by the outsides of people. They who seemed so confident, so easeful, so strong. And I, a sea turtle following the city lights instead of the moon.

This winter we hung the bird feeder my father gave us last summer. Squirrels and sparrows and cardinals gather in our backyard. Sharing, stealing, racing and chasing each other over the top of the bench by the fire pit, underneath the new trampoline, past the garage with the weight machine my husband assembled with the boys, and the rock tumbler, tumbling and rumbling raw amethyst and tiger’s eye into gems for Diana.

The kids play for hours outside in the cold because this is how they can see a friend. Riding bikes, clutching sleds, climbing trees, and tossing footballs until the sky turns dark. When a door closes, another opens.

If it weren’t for the virus, would we have kept clambering for more — richer, taller, fuller, more?
Terrified of what would happen if we stopped. If we let things decline, decay, melt back into the earth.
Cancer is the name we give to what never stops growing.

I used to love silent breakfast at the retreat center. Naps in the dorm room.
I would watch the sky turn gradations of yellow and gray and taupe from my bunk bed and think, God must live here. I didn’t realize that this was the feeling of being at one with myself in the world.

This winter silence, this absence, this draining of color and noise. An abundance of stillness.
Time to reflect, time to paint, to sew, to read, to dream.
Destruction blowing on the embers of creation.

My children have been doing school at home for almost a year now. The crowds of people I’d see every day — men in suits, women in hose, getting on the metro after dropping off their kids — I don’t see them anymore. I always imagined they were rushing off to do important things. Science or Education. Congress. World Peace. And I’d go home to my writing room and try to spin straw into gold by 3 o’clock.

Our high school senior is now in that room logging into class on Microsoft Teams. I write in the bedroom with the cat, who always finds an empty nook in my body to find warmth. Down the hall, Diana does reading workshop, and in her breaks, shows me how fast she can type on Typing.com. The boys are in the living room below, and our college student has returned home, now getting ready for her job at the bakery.

Death and life are two sides of the same coin. Endlessly flipping, tossing, through eternity.

Some days, when my husband takes the kids out, all I hear is the faint rumble of a plane plowing through the clouds. A single car shimmering over the icy street.

I tell myself, surrender.
Be still, while you can.
Go deeper.
Rest.
And when you wake, do not let yourself be led around on a leash by your barking brain.
Be guided by the heart of you, that silent prow cutting through the uncertain seas of your life.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

The Vaccine Won’t Prevent This

The long-hailed solution to our big problem has arrived.

I want people to be safe, I want us to be healthy and free, 
but I don’t want to be vaccinated against what I’ve seen.

I don’t want to be injected so 
we can go back to the way things were.

Needles and vials returning us to a world 
where producing was the dominant art form,
where days were subdivided into rectangles of time,
where we were stretched until we forgot the shape of our own selves.

I don’t want to be returned to a world
where ‘nothing to do’ meant something was wrong,
where the shy person inside was dragged along until she was tattered,
never given a chance to speak,
where the panoply of human activity made me dizzy
until I stumbled and fell.

What will prevent us from replacing our masks
with face coverings we can’t see? 
Walking around as if in costume, 
the imaginary spotlight always asking: 
is my life interesting, dramatic, memorable?

Where is the vaccine to protect us from a world 
where we worship people with power and step on those with none?
Where humans are divided into ever smaller categories, 
peering at each other from behind the walls.

When we go back, will it still be normal
that the closing of a restaurant means that
some will lose their homes, and others will simply order in?

Are we broken enough to forget and start all over again? 
Have the waves of chaos washed over our eyes so we may see anew?

How will we bear being vaccinated,
then walk back into world that is still sick?

Posted on by Amy Suardi

What the Super Bowl Commercials Said

We watch the Super Bowl for the homemade guacamole and chicken wings that we get to eat in front of the TV once a year. I like the half-time show and the fireworks and the chance to have a feast on a Sunday night.

When I was growing up, I would watch Brady Bunch reruns on a TV that my mother covered with a Navajo rug when it was not in use. French lace hung from the windows and botanical paintings from the walls. In between scenes of Gilligan’s Island and The Six Million Dollar Man, the commercials kept me in touch with an America that bought Stretch Armstrongs and Baby Alives from Toys ‘R Us, and Ford tough trucks and Dodge Rams with 0% down. Where dads grilled and slapped each other on the back, and girls made cookies in Hasbro Easy Bake Ovens.

I never really knew if ads imitated life or life imitated ads. I was both attracted to the sharp-focus slickness, and wary of it, as if it were a supermarket cake that tasted better than it made you feel.

Last night we passed around yucca fries and ginger beer with lime in front of Super Bowl 55, where helmets were engraved with ‘End Racism’ and seats were filled with cardboard cut-outs of people who paid $100 to not be there. And in between the tackles and interceptions, we got a taste of what America is doing, or what corporate America wants us to do, this year, 2021, a year that once rang futuristic, now the second year of the pandemic:

  • Keep ordering grub from neighborhood restaurants via DoorDash and Uber Eats because, as Stephen Colbert said in a public service announcement for small businesses, “when all this is over, we want them to still be there.”
  • Get Amazon’s new sexy robot Alexa, because it’s like having a hot cyborg be your servant.
  • Because social distancing is still necessary, keep ‘the backyard thing going’ with Scott Miracle-Gro (and John Travolta).
  • Subscribe to new streaming empires like Paramount+ where you can bypass terrestrial television and order up whatever you want through the Internet, including Beavis and Butthead, The Jersey Shore, and Star Trek.
  • Eat a lot of the new puffy Doritos.
  • Win a chance to ride on a spaceship in the first all-civilian mission on SpaceX’s Falcon rocket, brought to you by a tech billionaire who bought extra seats.
  • Pay people anywhere in the world to do digital jobs on Fiverr.com, the 5 & Dime marketplace for virtual freelance gigs.
  • Get out and trample trails and catch fish with Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s because when everyone is feeling cooped up, “we need nature more than ever.”
  • Invest in the American Dream with smartphone apps like Rocket Mortgage and Robinhood, because anyone should be able to buy and sell stocks, not just the rich.

The multi-million dollar, celebrity-studded commercials were sprinkled with ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia, including cameos by Pacman, the guys from Wayne’s World, and Sylvester Stallone. Each was styled like a video game or a movie made with a hand-held camera or a heart-tugging documentary featuring everyday people. Each like a cut in a multi-faceted diamond showing all the different-colored faces, all the power and glitz, celebrating and mocking our diversity, our troubled land, our beautiful powerful broken country.

I’m still not sure whether the blitz of video clips that studded the Super Bowl is a set of mirrors or a collection of mesmerizing pictures. But if you held it all in your hands, you would see an America soaring to the stars in technology, but dreaming of the past. Pandering to its celebrities, yet wanting to elevate the common man. Ashamed of its past, and trying to airbrush equality. Giving the people control of the levers, but keeping the gold in the same old places.

Posted on by Amy Suardi

A Face You Know

Galushko Semen/Shutterstock

When you hear that voice saying, 
I’m nobody
and 
my life is boring,
your mind has become 
a newspaper, 
reporting on your life 
as if it were 
where you would find 
celebrities and calamities, 
awards and booms.

You have believed 
the reporters in your head, 
the editors and executives,
that you are measured by 
how loud and unusual you are.

You who washes the clothes, 
feeds the children,
shovels the snow, 
think you don’t matter, 
as you scrape drifts of snow off the car 
as deep as a New York cheesecake,
and wonder when you’ll get 
to your next appointment. 

Snowflakes fall as you
you heave them up and throw them away, 
thinking you live in a world 
robbed of mystery.

Galushko Semen/Shutterstock

They keep coming, like unopened letters, 
not one like another.
So many that they make
the cypresses bow, 
the streets hush,
the fields round.

You will not understand them
by reading the paper, 
and that is why you must
close it up, 
and look out.
Greet each six-pointed star 
like a messenger, 
a memory, 
a face you know.