Overlooked Tendernesses

On listening to impulses and finding new paths

When I realize I’m alone in the house on a Wednesday morning, I take a bath at 10am. It’s as easy as deciding, this side-stepping of normal routine. Instead of doing emails with my clothes on, I get naked and sit in a tub of hot water, fiercely punching at the letters on my phone. Sometimes, as a lifelong planner, I forget that I have this freedom. That I can just listen to impulses and follow them off the beaten path into the long grass. What would it be like to live a whole day of these impulses? I wonder. A week? A life?

I follow another impulse and look up the etymology of the word, wondering if it shares a root with “imp.” Because there’s this feeling of impishness, of devilry, sitting here in the bathtub in the middle of a weekday morning. Someone on Reddit has already done the research for me: not related.

I can feel myself reaching for something these days, looking for connections that might not even be there. Trying to pull disparate entities together until they glow with new association. It happens every year at this time. Something about the witchiness of October, the onion skin getting even thinner between worlds, the bluster of wonder that comes as the leaves drop like loose teeth in a dream. Every autumn, there’s an urge inside me to extend my arm beyond its socket, groping at something just out of grasp. 

It reminds me of an improvised movement I added to the performances we recently did to celebrate the release of my new album, See You At The Maypole. At the very end of the show, I bent down to grab the centerpiece of a maypole—a bit of stage design magic created by my friend, mentor, and movement director Kora Radella. The idea was, I’d lift the centerpiece and turn, and the colorful ribbons that had been limply connected to the band members the whole time would rise, grow taut, and we’d become a living maypole.

But when we got to that moment, there was more time to fill in the music. So before the big finale, I began reaching out to each band member in a delicate port de bras. It was a gesture of acknowledgement, but also of yearning. I did this seven times, tracing each axis. Sonya, Zubin, Jason, Josh, Rebecca, Elena, Kristina. A spinning wheel with seven spokes. Tumbling forward, not touching, yet still drawn together by some invisible force. I reached so far in each direction, I thought I might fall over. And yet those ribbons held me.

It makes me think of an oak, with its branches splayed in a wide rainbow. The reaching and bowing, a perpetual arc, I wrote in a poem that later became the song “Heartwood,” in which I imagine myself as an oak tree. In ancient times, the maypole was made from a living tree, and so that’s what I became onstage, there at the end of the show, ribbons flowing toward and away from me. Reaching and bowing in every cardinal direction.

Let me be oak, I said, and so I was.

On Friday, I drive south to pick up a filing cabinet for my father—one of the many small details of a life that gets harder to hold in the early stages of dementia. Roads flow like ribbons in all directions. I know the route well, but the day is so blue and beautiful, the trees so vivid in their shifting rainbow of leaves, that I decide to prolong the drive and take a detour. Impulse leads me down an unfamiliar road in a familiar town.

There’s something thrilling about getting a little bit lost in a place you know so well. I turn onto a country lane marked by a wide red barn, the arc of its gambrel roof like a cupid’s bow mouth. Above the barn, the sky is shadowed with buzzards, circling.

In a beautiful essay for Orion Magazine, the poet and writer Lia Purpura recasts herself not as an oak but as a buzzard. She writes lovingly about the often overlooked bird and finds meaning in the way these carrion-eaters take not just the big parts of a dead animal, but dig deeper into “the shreds and overlooked tendernesses too small for a meal.” These shreds, she continues, are “like brief moments that burst: isolate beams of sun in truck fumes, underside of wrist against wrist, sudden cool from a sewer grate rising.”

I realize, watching the buzzards now, that this is the business I’m in these days; this is where these impulses are leading me. Towards a kind of scavenging, picking at the threads between things. Clawing at ribbons of flesh, looking for something luscious and sustaining in the tiniest moments.

Now that the album is out, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m in that funny slump that happens after the build-up, the inevitable flag of energy after the great punch upward. I feel a bit adrift. But I look to the buzzards overhead, at the way they continue to circle and dance their patient dance, and I trust that impulse and intuition will lead me down to ground again. That there will be new pathways ahead, if I let myself get a little bit lost.

It seems obvious now—how following impulse leads us to make new connections. It’s the universe calling out to us, and so often we don’t hear it, but when we really listen, we might find ourselves drawn down a new road, hurtling in a different direction, or in the bathtub at 10am on a Wednesday, writing fresh ideas. We might improvise a gesture that expresses something essential, feel our bodies move into alignment.

I’m not lost for long. The road eventually links back up with Route 66, and I pick up the filing cabinet from an army vet on Facebook Marketplace and drive it over to my father’s. Our arms reach around the white particle board as we muscle the heavy thing into his apartment. We push it into place beneath his desk, and I wonder what he will file away in there, what he will keep.

Even hours later, I can still feel the ache in my arms. The reaching leaves me bowed as an oak.

On Monday, I take a walk at a nature preserve with Cait. When we come upon a staircase cut into the side of a hill, I take the stairs while she chooses to walk beside them, following the natural course of the slope. See, she points out, looking back once we reach the bottom, I’m not the only one who had the impulse to do that. The ground next to the stairs is tamped down and rubbed bare from all the other people who decided to go that way too. It makes a new path, connecting the top of the hill to the bottom in a straight line.

There’s a name for these kinds of paths, she says, and the idea sounds familiar, but we can’t remember what they’re called. Later she looks it up and texts me. Of course. They’re called “desire paths.” The path that your heart wants to follow, heeding some kind of internal call, even if it’s not the way you think you should go.

May we remember to listen.