For years I collected bones. And they were heavy. And though I knew the physical place we would carry them to, I had never considered what I would do with all that weight. It was during this time that I began to dream of digging. Of carving a place in the earth I could look at and imagine laying them in. And it was in these dreams that I began to ask myself this question, does anything go away?
Three years later I break ground and begin a digging practice to consider this question.
I study the meaning of words, and begin to write definitions on walls over and over and over again. I am searching for the right words to ask this question, but they are not there. words have always failed me.
I come across an exhumed child’s casket for sale in a shop. And I inquire of its story. It is sad. and it is real. But I’ve never seen such an honest object and I’m drawn to it, despite its sadness, despite its weight. And I wonder… because this is an object that was specifically made to put something away…
I think. I think more, and am so unsettled that the discomfort calls me. I decide that I will buy it, and I will live with it. Because I believe I can learn something from it. And I know that when the time comes that I cannot live with it anymore I will bury it. This makes sense. So I live with it and pay attention and from day to day it changes its meaning to me. I decide I need to weigh it because that seems the only measurement that I can hold onto when everything else about it seems so impossible to capture. The casket weighs 25lbs.
I take 25lbs of soil from the hole I’ve been digging and sew it into a canvas bag. I set both of these in a room facing each other, each on their own table. The scale is there. I consider the empty space between the casket and the soil, it is a void. I wonder, how does one traverse that space? What would that take? How might one reconsider the means by which they measure the significance of anything for themselves? I understand that this is my road.
I continue to dig and study the meaning of words. I realize there is a more important question and leave the former to ask myself this:
What does it mean to live with everything that doesn’t go away?
I dig in a white dress because I need to see what that experience looks like outside of my body, through the residue of dirt and sweat which such an experience demands. I hang the dress in a room against and with my words. The dress teaches me. It teaches me that the digging is important work. That it is worthy of dressing and showing up for.
In my study of words and in my digging I find a response to this question. I translate that response by authoring a definition to a word I do not believe exists in the language that I know.
I share this with a few people. but they don’t seem to understand. Yet I believe this space, _______________: and the definition are of unexplainable importance. That they point to a question of whether or not we have a word or frame in language with which to consider the current state of something being a direct consequence of all that came before. I’m driven by an urgency to explain this. So I continue on this road.
I construct a cedar crate that will carry my casket across the desert back to my home. Because my digging started in Baltimore and I live in New Mexico. I remember that I’ve been wanting to raise a chicken.
In September, I travel to Florida and I dig there. Where the topsoil is thin and there is sand beneath it. Mixed together the earth looks like ash and that is something that remains with me. I stop digging in dresses. I realize this is work I need to be doing every day and therefore worthy of every day clothing. This road is always teaching me.
I am taught to weld and set out to build an incubator for the chicken I want to raise, but which I will eventually kill and eat. But only after the naming. After the building of the coop. After the appreciation of her eggs. After the living with her. After the loving and caring. This is part of the journey. Because the chicken will teach me, and I will appreciate the chicken always for that.
But it’s one day at a time, one egg at a time. presence, consumption, value, labor. I imagine it’s all those things in some way. It’s about building a relationship to the cost of all of the things I consume every day- through one, perhaps small, but hopefully meaningful relationship.
I then come to this vision that I must sand down to something. That the sanding, like the digging is important. From this, I imagine a wall that is embedded with the impressions of old crutches, a wall I will make and then cover over so that I can sand down to reveal them. Because the sanding feels like significant work, work that I must also be doing every day. As a way to get closer. As a way to point me to the impressions of historical trauma that we are all living with and that reside on the surface of our lives but which my privilege prevents me from actually feeling. So it’s about sanding down to reveal the cracks, the fractures in our society that permeate all that is built on top of everything that never went away.
And the sanding is tedious, as it should be. it strips my finger pads of their imprint and I wake every morning with a pain in my hand. I begin to understand this act in relation to my body. And I remember it that way. I try to remember as much as I can.
After years of looking for just one, I find a collection of short-handle hoes, all that have been shaped and used over a long period of time. These hoes were used in american fields by migrant farmworkers, where life has been hard and unfair. Eventually they were banned in parts of this country for their backbreaking design but only after a long fight. So I make a box to put these hoes and their stories in and dig a space in the ground that will hold this box.
I then take one of the hoes that has been worn down and shaped and I buy a long handle hoe and saw the handle off till it is the same size as the one from the collection. But this one I will work myself, in my digging practice, for as long as it takes for this hoe to resemble the other. I want to build a relationship to this object. Because I believe this relationship can help inform the way I encounter other objects, and this seems worthwhile
All of these relationships are in pursuit of my question.
I seek out conversations that will help me understand this journey, what it means, why it is important. In one of them I am asked a different question:
“If a hole is a void, and you fill it, does it go away?”
I hold onto this and begin another journey but that I know is connected. For all journeys are connected. And thus begins my exploration into the void…
I sit in on college classes about voids, the oceanic void, the void of space, the emotional voids we all hold in our lives. I wonder how one could “feel” a void. I think that maybe in “feeling” I could find an answer. But I also know there will always be more questions.
I have many more conversations. In some I am able to see myself, in some I’m left misunderstood and misunderstanding, in some I grow more than I could have ever imagined, in some I know my intellect is not worthy but I fight anyway.
But I struggle, the question nags at me and I need more. Because I’m is so unsure and because I know this question is important and nothing I’ve done has explained it. And though all of these relationships are about engaging in a process that will allow me to further consider my place and role in this world I begin to understand that none of them could ever ask, answer or refine my question to another person while carrying the political gravity the question deserves. Though I’m not ready to leave them. I am committed to them and to the idea I’m carrying in my mind of how they might change or inform me in some way. But this understanding does shift my focus from the question itself to why the question is important and that seems groundbreaking, like I’m standing on ground-zero, at the real beginning.
Today this where I find myself. At the beginning. Open. completely open… Trying to constantly remind myself that there is a space between everything. And if you consider the space between a question and an answer, how anyone gets from one of those points to the other is only for them to understand. Perhaps each of us can only have our own truth, and it is up to us- if we are willing, to consider how our truth is related to someone else’s. Maybe that is the “everything” for me. The realization that there is a cost to everything. The cost of my ease is directly related to the dis-ease of another. I am part of an invisible system, created far before I was born, but inherited and live in the legacy and privilege of. And so I sand and I dig, to remind myself that the cost of the American Dream included genocide and slavery and a justice system that was built and shaped in an ideology of white supremacy. I dig to remind myself that I live on occupied land. Which last year I bought a piece of. And every month I mortgage my relation to that reality not only in the payment I send in but in the time I spent earning it. For me this is what it means to be present in my relationship to and within this world, as a white american woman.
This past month I’ve been thinking what does ground-zero look like for me in this investigation. Why does this question matter? All this time that I’ve been considering this question I’ve focused on the responsibility of reckoning with what it means to live with everything- all the legacies of trauma, to people, to species and to the earth, but not knowing how to connect that to myself and to each of us individually. How does one connect to the truth or whole of the past when it is completely inaccessible as it’s so huge and unrecorded in its entirety. And so I keep asking myself, what if experiences do not go away? what if instead they changed form through impression and impact and legacy. We would then have to accept that today we are living with them all. So what does that mean for us? What would it look like to face ourselves in that reality? This I believe is my ground-zero and the beginning.