*Click* went the switch, shutting off the wifi.
I frowned.
Several weeks earlier, my partner Jesse had been poking at the bottom of the salad bowl when he announced: “I just want to take a day every week to be in nature. Offline.”
My mind stuttered. A whole... day? every... week? doing... nothing?
I murmured nice, affirming things, hoping he wouldn’t bring it up again.
He brought it up again. 🙄
So there we were, outside our cabin on a late-summer Saturday morning.
We walked to the shrine Jesse had built out of found wood. I went OHMMMMM and Jesse went OHMMMMM. I lit incense and set it on the shrine.
The sweet smoke wafted up, tickled my ancestors’ noses, and stirred them from their slumber. They crowded around the windows of my eyes, yawning, trying to work out how many decades had passed since they’d last woken.
We bowed to the shrine.
“Oy vey, is animism in again? I can’t keep up,” said a Great-Great-Great-Grandmother, the one who had eleven children and an opinion about every one of them.
“Whatever it is, I like this bowing,” said an Uncle from long ago. “The deeper and more respectful your bow, the better hamstring stretch you get.” This ancestor is always pointing out how to get the best deal.
I spontaneously bowed again, luxuriating in a deep stretch.
“Ahhhh,” my ancestors sighed in unison.
When he’d built the shrine, Jesse had asked how tall to make it. Eye level, I’d said, thinking only of human ergonomics. Only after he’d attached it to the tree did I remember that the shrines we’d seen in Japan and Thailand sat low, presumably because spirits aren’t as tall as we are.
So Jesse built a little ladder.
“Plus, the spirits get a nice workout,” the Uncle pointed out.
Opening ceremony complete, we walked to a clearing in the woods, laid out a blanket, and set down sacks of snacks and books.
I put on a wide-brimmed hat because I’m afraid of wrinkles, then abandoned it because it blocked my view of the canopy. Besides, what’s a head for if not to bathe in dappled late-summer sun? Maybe when people see my wrinkled face, they’ll feel the years of sun emanating from my pores, and it will warm them.
I sniffed the air. The word on the breeze was autumn.
I whined about how soon it would be cold. Jesse replied that this contrast was what made today beautiful, otherwise it would be just another sunny day and we wouldn’t savor it, blah blah blah.
I knew the truth: summer is Good and winter is Bad. But I kept my mouth shut, because Jesse is clever and can argue circles around my knowings.
The cicadas filled our silence. A Carolina chickadee, two fluffs bigger than a hummingbird, landed on a branch, sang a few statements I didn’t quite catch, and whizzed off.
The point of Nature Day was to rest. But just as I knew winter was Bad, I knew time was too precious not to instrumentalize for my goals, my important checkboxes. Like, ooh, I could get through this book and start on that one, get in three hours of qigong, then some meditation. I didn’t need the internet to be productive, ha!
And maybe one day a week in nature was the secret to productivity! Maybe I’d write a bestseller called Nature Day: The Productivity Breakthrough!
Okay, that’s not a good title, but I’d think of one…
Jesse, immune to my type-A neurosis, stretched out in the sun. He believed deep rest was an essential counterbalance to doing. That’s why he suggested Nature Day.
He looked so content, like a cat lying in a sunbeam. I yearned to rub his belly and picture him with lil fuzzy cat ears.
But time was ticking. I pulled out my stack of reading and opened the first book.
No... not this book.
I tried another, then a third. Hmm.
My mind felt like a jumble of browser tabs.
The cicadas quieted, then rose again, like waves. Squirrels scampered through the leaf litter, chasing each other. They looked like they were having fun.
Trees swayed.
Bit by bit, the perfect tranquil scene lulled my determination.
Fine. I pushed away the books and flopped onto my back.
Doing nothing... it was uncomfortable. My fascia had frozen into italics, pushing onwards, ever onwards.
I guess I just didn’t know how to be.
A gnawing pressure insisted that if I didn’t use every waking hour on my budding qigong business, I’d never become anything. My most lasting contribution to the world would be a giant trash heap left in my wake—expired ⅝-full sunscreen bottles, massage balls that never quite reached the ache under my shoulder blade, used menstrual pads, unused silicone cups bought to stop throwing away the pads…
I might never do anything worthwhile.
I might be... a waste.
“Hey, you’re not a waste,” the Uncle cut in.
“She is a waste. Not even having kids, not continuing the lineage!” The Grandmother of eleven facepalmed.
“Look at us,” the Uncle said, gesturing to the crowd pressed against the windows of my eyes to birdwatch. “No one remembers us.”
“She doesn’t even remember Shabbat—thousands of years we had this, and she needs a goy boyfriend to remind her! I went through labor eleven times for this?”
“A waste of time—our whole lives resulting in this kid who can’t sit still and read a book,” the Uncle said, nodding solemnly.
Then he flashed the crowd a twinkling grin. “I’d do it again.”
I let go and let go and let go, letting the ground hold me. I let go of all my striving and struggling to cajole my days into adding up to something—
I just. gave. up.
I went all the way into yin. Out popped a tiny dot of yang.
My right hand tapped.
The left one, too.
They tap-tap-tapped against the earth. I listened without thinking. The ancestors fought over who got to pull the levers on my arms, cranking out the rhythms they’d drummed when they had flesh-arms, too.
I rose to my feet, limbs flowing into a qigong form. My body sped up, faster and faster, until I was a freeform blur of hips and arms, fascia ungluing, unlearning afternoons in elementary school stuck at a desk, sitting still, always one gold star away from good enough.
The ancestors joined me.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” we yelled, hurling our existential back pain and intestine-fermented terror at the sky.
“AAAAAAAAAAHAAAAHAAAH!” we yelled, howling our resentment at every turn of events since the Big Bang.
Roused by the commotion, my ancestors’ ancestors woke and joined the arm-flailing, eager to air their own gripes. Then their ancestors woke. And their ancestors’ ancestors. On and on down the centuries, until the Great Mama herself, Mitochondrial Eve 💅🏿, stretched and yawned on her throne.
Irritated with her progeny, not for the first time, she rolled her eyes and reached for the big RESET button.
She pushed it.
WHOOOOSH! A cosmic wind hit us as time spiraled backwards.
First came my life, in reverse. No one noticed how much of it I’d wasted on anxious navel-measuring—my ancestors were too busy oohing and aahing at gadgets. There I was in Kyoto, as amazed by the AI images I conjured on my laptop as by the temples I’d flown across the world to see. There I was hunting and gathering food from Uber Eats on my magic tablet. There I was with my dad, hunched before a small monitor, holding my breath as the browser loaded a cat photo one line… of pixels… at a time.
Then I was gone, and the ancestors took the stage one by one, the same foibles and dramas in vintage clothes, set against coal-soot wallpaper.
There was the Uncle, watching in horror as every deal he’d ever haggled un-haggled.
There was the Grandmother of eleven, her babies climbing back into her belly one by one. The eleventh came first. She wept, having never held that baby—she hadn’t survived the delivery.
Mother into mother into mother, like a rose in reverse timelapse: petals unwithering, the blossom folding back into bud.
Time unwound faster. We watched the same blossoming on the scale of eons: species fading, blooming, budding.
(If you ever get the chance to behold your cosmic insignificance, I do recommend it. Five stars. The best deep tissue massage of your life. Like finally reaching that achy spot under your shoulder blade, but 1000x deeper. Way down to the place that’s been holding up your whole lil scared self since birth.)
Time reversed faster still, which was good because the Precambrian era is kinda dull.
The Moon unbirthed itself from the Earth and Theia’s violent embrace.
Countless stars died and un-died, sucking their light back into their bellies.
We hurtled toward the Big Bang itself, at which the Grandmother of eleven scrunched up her nose and shouted:
“Why bother? Keep it in the pants, buddy!”
Which—I must give it to Granny—is a pretty bold thing to say to all of Creation.
But we kept going, past the beginning, to the end of the line:
The Great Void.
Our backaches, our trash heaps, our report cards, our names, our very wisps of spirit-self—all like drops of rain dissolved into the ocean at the moment of impact.
We merged into the inky blackness of all-undifferentiated-nothing for all of no-time.
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh goes the sound of nothing.
No color. No light. No sound. No thing.
Peace.
After 283 eternities, the tiniest white island appeared. A dot of yang.
And WHOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—
—everything catapulted forward in a great explosion.
Sound! Light! Color! Wow!
I blinked, disoriented, at the late-afternoon sun streaming through the tree canopy.
“Well. I guess it ain’t all that bad, this existing thing,” Granny sniffed, her face refreshed from her spa day in the void. “I mean, if the alternative is nothing at all. Even though this place is shamefully out of control. And quite untidy.”
“Hey, our girl turned it off and back on again,” said the Uncle. “Who woulda thought. These kids are great at technology.”
The ancestors resumed birdwatching.
I stared at my hands: two meat patties with growths sprouting off them.
What was all that? The void? Nothing existed? I didn’t exist? And why are hands so weird?
Something felt weird inside, too.
Where I’d expected to find that gnawing pressure to be productive and make something of myself, I found a reverence for these bones, handed down mother by mother by mother by mother by mother by mother by mother by mother. Bones heaved over mountains of hope and slogged through marshes of sorrow.
Maybe all my doing had been a way to hide from the enormous awkwardness of just, like, accepting these bones—having done nothing to deserve them.
How do you even accept a gift like that?
I took in the trees swaying, the clouds passing. I listened to the squirrels scampering, Jesse dozing by my side.
I leaned over and rubbed his belly.
The sun meandered toward the treeline. We packed up and walked back to the cabin.
“How did you like Nature Day?” Jesse asked.
I tallied the damage: books unread, meditation unmeditated, future bestseller untitled.
“It was a waste of time,” I said. Then I grinned. “Let’s do it again.”
So beautiful and very relatable
Yes!!!