Small World

On finding power in moments of limitation

There are times when your world feels big. You see the lines holding everything together, like the miles of green tubing that connect the maple trees at sapping time. Everything is a sap run, intestinal, glistening, sticky with association. It’s all hum and resonance and expansion. If you just step outside your door, you might be struck by a wayward gust of inspiration, a revelation, an answer. I love Big World. I live for Big World.

But then there are times when your world feels so small, nothing speaks. All the connections are snipped and inert, hanging deflated, achieving nothing. You’re cut off from the source. You can’t see beyond the dim light dangling in front of you, illuminating a meager patch of darkness. Small World is a muted world, a dry world, like the dead-end of a cornfield maze.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks helping my father downsize and move into a local elder housing community. After touring for the first two months of this year, cross-stitching the earth with lines of travel, my world has gotten very small, hemmed in by this singular task. It has taken every ounce of my physical and emotional energy. Seeing the contents of his life so plainly, deciding what to keep and what doesn’t matter anymore. Hauling trash bags out to the bins, the black plastic splitting from too much weight, bits of metal jabbing my legs. Understanding that my father’s life—his hobbies and passions, a lifetime of following rabbit holes and finding treasures—is in those bags.

Things he loved and can no longer do: cooking, camping, crafting, biking. He ran marathons and wrote poems and songs. He collected Celtic instruments and acorns he found on long nature walks. He built a kayak. When I was a teenager and performing my own music for the first time, my father would set up my gear for every show, long before I understood anything about XLR’s and quarter-inch cables. But now, in the early stages of dementia, he doesn’t know his way around even the most basic technology.

Into the trash bags go tangled wires and defunct speakers, caked spices and cooking utensils, musty sleeping bags, busted instruments. We have to be ruthless, I tell him as he reaches out to touch a case of penny whistles. To be ruthless requires a certain amount of cutting oneself off.

Small World is a numb world, bordered by mile-high iron walls.

When I read through a draft of my memoir manuscript in the backseat of the van on tour, I made note of my most commonly used words. Among them were tiny and small. What is this preoccupation with describing constraint, I wonder? What is this fascination with the limitation of things?

Perhaps it goes back to when I was a kid and loved making fairy houses. The magic of a moss bed, acorn caps for cups, roofs slatted with seed pods. The preciousness of nature’s gifts reconfigured into a shelter. In this context, smallness was a superpower, and I longed to be able to lay my head on that moss bed and live among the fairies.

Lately, River has been listening to an abridged version of Alice in Wonderland over and over again, and there’s one scene that sticks with me. Alice has just fallen through the rabbit hole and realizes she must shrink in order to fit through the key-hole of a door. It’s only in downsizing that she’s able to get where she needs to go—as if to say, in our small moments, new worlds are possible.

You can see the secret exit—invisible til you’re down on your knees, I wrote in the song March Grass. I was three months into miscarrying at the time, actively looking for a way out of that hell. Sometimes, I realized then, it is only in our moments of despair—when we are at our smallest and most constrained—that we can find our way out of the labyrinth and see the true shape of things.

I thought it was only in Big World that the lines between things became clear, but now I see that I wasn’t looking hard enough. The connections, the gorgeous resonances, that vital hum—it’s all there in Small World too. It’s just subtler. It speaks in a whisper. Fine as gossamer, like a fairy’s clothesline made of spider silk.

As I’ve been throwing my father’s life away, I’ve also been listing some of the items on a Buy Nothing group. One couple drove an hour to pick up the djembe drum, and a young college kid said fuck yeah! as he loaded the prize of an exercise bike into his trunk. I like to imagine the hiking poles going to someone who loves the woods as much as my dad does, as much as he did. A part of him still engrained in the fiberglass bottom of the kayak he made, freely cutting through freshwater.

These things pass from us, changing hands, a cross-stitch of connection.

A reminder that it’s not such a small world after all.