On my drive home from the temple there are at least a hundred forsythia bushes—if not a hundred, a thousand—each one in full bloom. They are live, bright flashes of yellow against brown and green, impossible to miss. The yellow blossoms erupt in yards, in gardens, in wild, scraggly patches on the side of the road, the branches arcing and unpruned. My eye tracks them helplessly. There is nothing else in the landscape so vivid and bright.
Every spring I notice a different flower, which, once noticed, I can’t stop seeing. One year it was cherries, another year tulips, another year magnolias. This year it’s forsythia. It seems to be everywhere, including my own backyard. A series of bushes, startlingly yellow, marches down the grassy slope behind the house we’re renting until June. I couldn’t tell you when they began to bloom, only that they’re blooming now. Their season is short: the flowers only bloom for about two weeks. Soon they’ll be replaced by tender green leaves.
For the last two days, my ears wouldn’t stop ringing. The atmospheric pressure here was heavy, the air waterlogged. I felt as though I were on my life’s longest plane ride. Today it finally rained, and the pressure lifted. I didn’t notice it as first, the way you don’t always notice an absence. Then I went outside and looked at the forsythia. Each flower has four deeply lobed petals—they’re long, slender; the flowers look like crosses, or x’s. In the rain, the flowers droop downward, like little bells.
Forsythia is primarily native to China, Korea, and Japan, with one species native to the Balkans; the species of forsythia that has made its way to the Northeast, where I live, is a garden hybrid, Forsythia × intermedia. It’s a shrub in the olive family. Deciduous. It arrived in Europe and the Americas on the enthusiasm of garden designers, who thought they had “discovered” it in the East. Now it thrives all over New England, rioting in a foment of wild yellow. I promise I’ll write a letter about so-called invasive species, taken from Asia to the States—not this letter, but soon.
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A few years ago, while trying to work out the various knots and layers of my depression, my therapist pointed something out to me. When I was stressed, they noted, I tended to numb myself, reducing my capacity to feel both pain and joy. This was—this is—a coping mechanism, a way to compartmentalize difficult feelings in order to get my work done. But what I didn’t know was that in numbing myself to discomfort, I also anesthetized my ability to feel joy. To feel surprise and pleasure. To taste and smell and touch. Even now I can tell that something’s going on when I lose the ability to feel the temperature of the air on my face.
I have been numbing my heart to so much lately. There is so much suffering in the world, much of it senseless, much of it unimaginable. The information arrives at a rate that feels—that is—deadening. When I encounter the news—I don’t really read the news so much as it lands in front of me, on my feed or in my inbox—I can feel myself flinching away. I cannot conceive of how to live a normal life, and yet it seems like I must.
At a dharma talk last year—it was in December, I think, but maybe it was earlier—I remember someone asking about what to do, how to hold the knowledge of the genocide in Palestine. What the teacher offered surprised me: focus on just one image, one post, she said; I am paraphrasing. Really allow yourself to feel it.
At the time I didn’t understand it—why just one? But I understand it now, when I think about the numbness and inertia that submerging myself in an endless scroll of information creates. To really sit with one person’s story, one life: to truly feel it, and to allow that feeling in its entirety, nearly undoes me. As it should. As it will.
There’s a tendency in Western culture to avoid negative emotions. We want to know how to deal with them, how to get rid of them, how to not feel them. When I first started therapy and tiptoed into somatic practice, that’s what I wanted—to not feel bad, to stop feeling bad. What I didn’t know then, and what I’m still learning now, is that I must feel bad—grief, fear, rage—in order to feel anything. That I must feel everything, and that I cannot block it out.
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The thing about forsythia is that it demands being looked at. It’s so unmistakably vivid, so bright, even garish. The yellow isn’t the pale, demure butter-yellow of tulips or tea roses but cooler, saturated, the hot plasticine yellow of a life jacket or raincoat. On a hike the other day, from the top of a hill, I pointed out the patch of neon yellow amid the green. Look, I said, it’s the forsythia we passed on the way here.
And I have been trying, slowly, to feel everything. Which means feeling joy too. At dinner with a friend two weeks ago, we talked about how joy has become more bearable. Maybe bearable isn’t the word. It’s that joy has been rising to the surface, not because but despite. It’s that joy has become more possible to feel.
The warmth helps. More sun. The deliciousness of warmer air on bare skin. And the flowers.
Something about spring always makes me feel, acutely, how quickly time is passing. The cherry trees explode into white and pink and then just as swiftly they are green. The magnolias unfurl and drop their petals. The plums and crabapples leave pink snowdrifts on the ground. I’ve written of this before, how I don’t ever want to miss it, whatever it is, how I always want to be somewhere positioned just before the peak. That’s where I lived for so long, that moment of almost, that moment of yearning, feeling nostalgia for something that hadn’t even happened yet.
I don’t live like that now—I have grown more comfortable with contentment, with not making my happiness an ill-gotten prize that I am always about to lose—but even now, writing this, I want to urge you to go outside, to look at the forsythia, to take in its wild brightness, its otherworldly yellow glow. And I urge you to receive it—to let in that joy, to be capacious, to allow for all kinds of feeling.
Did you go outside? Will you go outside, after you read this, and tell me if you see forsythia, somewhere, in a garden or on the side of the road, in bloom?
Till soon,
LP
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