Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Yesterday, while trying to write a poem, I ran out of ink. I couldn’t locate another pen. When I went to shut the desk drawer, it jammed. The morning was…frustrating; words came in fits and starts. Phrases frittered as soon as I uttered them out loud.

Fed up, I grabbed a brown paper bag and without discretion emptied all the contents of my desk: erasers, old receipts, paper binders, junk. The bag sagged with several years’ worth of absent-minded storing. I followed this by neatening up the floor and by gathering empty cups and glasses strewn throughout my office. I shelved stacks of books and wiped down surfaces. I breathed and listened and listened, as the words eventually came.

I don’t do this enough, I thought, channel moments of debilitating writer’s block into impromptu decluttering sessions.

However, over the years, when my high-speed, high-traffic life slowed to a bumper-to-bumper six-lane freeway during rush hour, I learned to purge myself of oft-told stories, long-treasured values, and entrenched ideas. They shaped me but, I discovered, also prevented me from advancing to the next stages of my life, if not my art.

For example, I’d always believed in the dignity and value of work, as I was taught. Fortunately, however, thanks to the intervention of friends who love theme parks, concerts, and beaches, I now curate leisure and play as intentions as much as purposeful labor.

Likewise, narratives of unfairness and wrongs within my family clogged my ability to recognize the complexity of loved-ones and to appreciate our joy-filled moments — facts to remember before holiday dinners, funerals, and other gatherings.

I know that when I cannot write, when the words fail to arrive, something intangible is obstructing passage to the areas of my brain and heart. It hijacks my ability to imagine. To really hear the poetry of the world around me.

Today’s poem inspires a life approach where we clear what we’ve stored as essential in our life and where we learn to embrace loss that accompanies change. In doing so we perceive the moment we are living and are meant to record.

Emptying
by Aaron Zhang

The air emptied of summer.
The summer emptied of air.
The impression in the sand’s edge;
The wave as shadow. Silking over
The branches, spidering
As we watch. Lose a leaf, lose
Another. Lose the pretense
Of loss.

Where is the winter, the unimaginable
Zero winter? The noon and the paper
Wreath. The soiled and coiled
Breath. Waver in the dark beam.
Sit for the afternoon. Stir sand
Underfoot and hear
Nothing. Beneath light as a pool, a stream
Over the mouth, the bridge, the canal
Of an ear. Do you hear it ring.
The children leap and assume waterform.
The flesh of a shell, peach, cheek. 
Cochlea as nautilus, the world reflected
As warble. As sustenance, as the echo
Of a fallen peach.

"Emptying" by Aaron Zhang. Used by permission of the poet.