Listening in the Dark: Women Reclaiming the Power of Intuition by Amber Tamblyn

Author:Amber Tamblyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2022-08-12T16:24:22+00:00

A Brief Cartography of My Hands

By Lidia Yuknavitch

Author

My Love Affair with Rocks, Sticks, and Dirt

Alone is a real place.

Alone might be the most real place I’ve ever fully embodied. Alone is where I am when I conjure characters, where I create storytelling and where I let go the world of so-called authorities telling me to be something or do something else. Alone is how I learned the power of the invented story to combat the lies aimed to keep me small, quiet, and well-behaved. It’s where I can hear voices and trust them, where I can taste salt and hear the secrets of trees. Alone, as it turns out, has been everything.

Alone was first a vacant lot across the street from my childhood home. The words vacant lot just mean a piece of land that is not being used, you know, a place between things where kids play or animals and plants do whatever they want. Except that my mother was a real estate agent, so vacant lot also meant a piece of property that could yet be assigned a value, sold, and bought, which I understood at a fairly young age. Sometimes I had to go to open houses with her. I wondered for years when the vacant lot would shift from a liminal space to a construction site or some new homes in our cul-de-sac. My home was a vacant heart, which is why alone took on such vital meaning to me. It gave me the courage to risk trusting my intuition and hone in on my formidable story-making abilities. Meanings live underneath the surface of things.

My very first best friends were not people. Dirt, sticks, rocks, leaves, the bark of madrones and Douglas fir trees. Dirt in particular mesmerized me. I buried so many things in the dirt in that vacant lot. Rocks, pennies, pieces of paper on which I’d drawn a sun, a tree, or a boat on some ocean, a spoon, a pair of underwear, a metal toy jeep, and several of my father’s architectural drawing pens. Very fancy pens, not regular pens. They were to me, anyway, as a child impossibly obsessed with objects. Faber-Castell pens.

I also used to eat dirt, small stones, paper, and bark, sometimes while hiding out in the vacant lot, dreaming up worlds where being a kid and being a tree or earth or a rock could somehow merge. The Pacific Northwest rain growing us.

The day I buried the Faber-Castell pens in the ground, my father called me into the kitchen after dinner, where he leaned against the sink he’d never washed a dish in, in kind of a casual, architect pose, his arms crossed a little beautifully across his chest. As usual, I had no idea where my mother was, in some other vacancy, some liminal space.

“Let me see your hands,” he said.

One time I took his fancy pens and drew imagined maps on both of my palms and arms. So he already knew I had an interest in his pens.

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