On Starting

Pedal bikes, a poem about a leaf, and the physics of friction

Hi and welcome to Toward Utter Aliveness, a brand-new, biweekly newsletter—in the form of musings, poems, and ideas for action—about how we can creatively conspire to build divine, embodied community. I hope you will grab a tasty beverage, take a long, slow breath, and join me for the adventure! —Devon

Not long ago, we were at an indoor BYO-bicycle birthday party for a four year-old that was somehow less disastrous than it sounds. My daughter had abandoned her fancy balance bike, which she now rides speedily and skillfully, for another child’s pink, cartoon-branded pedal bike with training wheels. Thankfully its owner was distracted at the coloring station and didn’t seem to mind.

My kid, who’s three and a half, had been talking all day about her resolve to ride a pedal bike. When she finally got the opportunity to try one, her determination was palpable. The muscles of her face contracted, her elbows splayed wide. But progress on the pink bike was slow-going. I approached her and checked in.

“So what do you think of this pedal bike?”

“It’s—so—hard—to—start—” she grunted, teeth gritted, as she fought for the force to urge the stationary pedals into movement.

“Wow, that does look tough.”

A wave of recognition washed over me. So many things in my life feel like this little pink bike at the moment: building a writing career, teaching about motherhood, relaunching my website, gathering some kind of artist’s circle, making a will, renewing my passport, hanging pictures on my wall, going back to dance classes. The list goes on. And prominent on that list: this newsletter/blog thing.

I’ve known I wanted to start a newsletter for probably a year and eight months. And I’ve known where I wanted to put it for twelve months, and what I would likely call it for six. If, miraculously, you are reading this now, and you are not me, it has been a long time coming.

I am a person, like that pink cartoon bike, with a high coefficient of static friction. The force required to get me in motion is monumental. But once I’m going, things tend to move along; the coefficient of kinetic friction is much, much lower. Once we’re moving, I know the game. I have a schedule. People are relying on me to follow through. Most of the things I was afraid of are not that big a deal. I am motivated by achievement, completion. I went to school for 20 years, I hiked all 2,175 miles of the Appalachian Trail, and—for better or worse—I finish almost every book I start.

Oh, but the starting. Perhaps my personality is partially to blame, or being a Taurus, but I know it’s more than that. Perfectionism is not the gilded pseudo-flaw I once thought it to be. It’s insidious, and systemic, and entangled with my race and class and gender and centuries of trampling others in an attempt not to be trampled. My ancestors lived in a world where to be seen at all, you had to be good, or better than good. Humans, it seems, like to disguise our supremacies of being in supremacies of talent.

There are many antidotes to the perfectionist poison, all of them wild and untamed. Almost two years ago, I did that impossible thing—started—a series of posts on Instagram centered around a favorite poem (and gospel) of mine: Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese. In 100 posts over ten months, I explored a creative response to everyday life. Publicly. It changed my life.

The Wild Geese Project forced me to strip away at least enough layers of fear and imposter syndrome to dive into the pool. It helped me to see that when I did so—even when the thing I produced wasn’t all that great, or was objectively bad—I didn’t drown. Every attempt was healing for my own wound of inhibition, and occasionally, I heard that others appreciated the words I’d written too.

After 100 posts, though, I crossed the finish line. Checked the box. Satisfied my achiever-self. In order to keep going, I had to…start over. And here we are, almost a year later.

And then one day last week, I opened my journal and began scribbling down these words.

This newsletter is, in part, my continuation of the Wild Geese Project. I named it after a clause from another poem from my gospel cannon: Demand, by Langston Hughes. I expect it to be about endless curiosity, longing, beauty and pain, embodiment, community, everyday delights, and existential pursuits. My hope is to produce and share it every two weeks and to include an essay/musing, early draft poem, and a conspiratorial prompt of some kind for as long as you and I find it worthwhile.

I may fail. I guarantee it will sometimes be really, really challenging, and sometimes what I write will be boring, or cringy, or grammatically suspect. But after today (Leap Day, at that!), never again will I have to take that giant, terrifying, first step.

Back at the birthday party, as my daughter sat on that silly pink bike, wrinkled with determination, I could see that she wanted nothing more than to feel the handlebar streamers fluttering as she tore across the open Grange Hall floor.

“Would you like a push?” I asked, and with a nod and a nudge, she was off.

Zone of Abscission

You hang there, shriveled
and brown, rattling like a 
skeleton in the cold winter wind

Why do you hold on so long?
I ask the brittle beech leaf
most of whose peers have 

succumbed, dropped, decayed
and now nourish their maker’s
roots under a blanket of snow

Did you somehow miss the message?
Were you caught up, interrupted
on the road to release? Or is this

iron grip compensation for a
long-ago loss? Would you let go, angel,
if you could? If, as the Seneca say,

you persist in defiance of
winter, I recognize the impulse:
no one taught me how to stop

or how much faith it would take
to wait, naked, for an eventual
spring. no one taught me what

to secrete to seal my scars from
infection. I see, as you surely do, that
it would be cleaner that way

and yet here we linger, dead-ish
looking for our sign, to leave
knowing very little except that

it’s just not time

1. Take a big breath in through your nose. Let it go slowly out your mouth. Soften your shoulders. Unfurl your chest. Give your bottom jaw a wiggle, and maybe even yawn.

2. Close your eyes, and listen for the voice of the thing you haven’t yet started. How loud is it? Hear it out. Perhaps write down its requests. Notice if, though not-yet-born, it wants to be witnessed, and honor that.

With light, life, and love,

Devon