On Letting the Moods in

Or, becoming a stone in a stream

I’ve distracted and numbed myself for seventeen years. I’m sick of it.

Of the many things I repeat to my therapist, the fantasy of skipping my iPhone into a body of water like the perfect skipping-stone it is, is top of the list. I’d sink into the right position with my feet firmly planted on the beach or the bank of a river, athletic stance, sturdy. The corner of my phone would fit just right in the curves of my index finger, its weight resting in my hand, steadied by my thumb. I’d wind up and release. Easy. Just like that. I’m sure I’d get at least three skips, but if it torpedos right in, so be it. Let it sink into the murky depths, like gollum’s precious ring.

Aside from not wanting to pollute the Atlantic or the Charles with rare metals, the reason I haven’t lived out this fantasy is because as much as I dream of quiet solitude and thumbs that don’t ache, I crave connection and the feeling of being relevant. I think about this so often I have a framework.

Picture a two by two. On one axis is your level of connectedness or how plugged in you are. Do you post on social media? Can you speak to every article in the New Yorker? Can anyone text you at any time? Or, are you somewhere off grid without even a land line telephone? The other axis is your level of cultural relevance. Or, to what degree does your public body of work make you desired?

Early in the pandemic, I declared to Emily, “I want to be a sheep farmer in Vermont, write obscure books under a pseudonym, and never talk to anyone ever again.” That’s a special kind of angst that only erupts so often. But as it relates to my framework, I do fantasize about existing in the low connectivity and high relevance quadrant. Wendell Berry is my model for this. Farmer, poet, philosopher, he has produced volumes of beloved work while he quietly works his landscape in peace. (I imagine, I don’t know him.) And if you want to get in touch, you must write him a letter or catch him on his landline. Don’t try leaving a message, because he doesn’t even have an answering machine. The Wendell Berry model of cultural relevance is also on the list of things I repeat to my therapist. Widely beloved body of work / good luck finding me.

If I could only focus enough to create said body of work.

For seventeen years, since the day I bought the first iPhone, I’ve had the same ticks. Open browser, check news, remark at how ridiculous everything is, open social media, self-loath, scroll, scroll, scroll. You know it. The news has changed, Instagram reels have made things exponentially worse, but the quick and constant hits of dopamine remain the same.

For the same seventeen years, I’ve been on a mission to understand my mind. It’s hard for me to focus during the day. I crave shiny new things. I could daydream the day away without my thoughts ever reaching the tangible world; I’ve learned to trick myself into doing the things I need to do to feel a sense of accomplishment.

It’s not all about production though. In addition to my little handheld dopamine doom portal being a massive distraction, it also makes me numb. It’s not that I don’t feel anything, it’s that my moods are more simple and subdued. This makes me angry. That makes me sad. Where has my melancholy gone? Boredom? Where’s my wonder? Compassion? How about joy? WHAT ABOUT ELATION?!

Things came to a head recently while our entire family was home sick with Covid and had to cancel a two week trip. Feverish and achy, I lay in bed, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. I scoffed at the idiots in the news. I couldn’t turn away. I was hopeless, helpless. I longed to be elsewhere, anywhere. I tried watching a YouTube video but found I didn’t even have the attention span for that. I stared at the stack of books on my nightstand, but couldn’t get myself to pick anything up. I didn’t even feel like writing. None of my projects, usually sources of inspiration and motivation, were the slightest bit enticing. I was sick, on top of already being sick.

In a burst, I deleted Instagram, my browser, and my ability to download apps from my phone. Then I blocked every individual news site I could think of on my computer. I cannot live like this anymore.

I need to let the moods in. I need to give myself a chance.

This binge and purge cycle is, of course, also not new to my therapist. But, in this week’s session, I did find a new metaphor. I said I want to be like a stone in a stream; sturdy and still as the water flows by. I’ve let the torrent drag and tumble me for too long. I’ve allowed the myth of constant connectivity distract me from true connection and overwhelm my nervous system to the point where I don’t feel as deeply.

Photographer and activist, Nan Goldin, said in an interview with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (one of my favorite places on Earth), that her “advice to young people is to put down their phones.” And that, “You have a lot more to say than Instagram. And a lot to experience in the real world. The most important thing is standing in front of another person and feeling empathy for them. And that can't be done on the phone.”

It’s that simple. It has to be.

I think about life before iPhones often. Not just mine as a child but others’ lives too. My wife, daughter, and I were in Woodstock, NY last week and visited Opus 40, a landscape scale sculpture built by one man. In 1938, Harvey Fite bought an abandoned blue stone quarry in Saugerties, NY and for the next thirty seven years, cut, dug, hauled, placed, and sculpted a new landscape into being, stone by stone. I first visited Opus 40 on a field trip in college (pre-iPhone) and have thought about the effort and focus it took to build ever since. After this visit, some questions have lingered: Are stories like this possible anymore? Are there people out there (aside from Wendell Berry) who are so unplugged, so unaffected by the constant current woes, they’re able create in this way, at this scale? Stone by stone, word by word. I want there to be. I need there to be.

So, what does all this have to do with moody places?

Simply, I have not been able to sense them lately and I want to. I need to. I keep thinking how they used to be more abundant and how I must plan a trip to visit one. Lately, they’re always somewhere else, somewhere hard to access. But they used to be everywhere.

What if they still are and it’s me who cannot sense them? What are we, if not sensitive creatures feeling our way through landscapes? One of the most important things I’ve misplaced through my distraction and numbness is my ability to notice the subtle moods all around me. The way the light hits the top of my neighbor’s house at sunset. The way the breeze rustles the massive locust trees along our street. Shadows cast by the trees I’ve planted at dusk. Or right now, the way the setting summer sun reflects off a car parked across the street and sends a golden beam of light through the deep green canopy of the birch clump in our front garden and illuminates the single pane glass of our old weighted windows as if it were stained glass in a church. I wouldn’t have noticed this last week.

In his book, The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane says the two questions we should ask of any landscape are: “What do I know in this place that I know nowhere else?” and “What does this place know of me that I cannot know myself?”

These are beautiful questions guiding us toward understanding what many refer to as a sense of place, an overly-used term I’ve always believed to have at least two meanings. Not only, what is it we sense when we’re in a place, but also, what does this place sense in us? In other words, our inner landscape is the outer landscape. And if that is true, then it must also be true in reverse, our inner landscapes become the outer landscapes.

And what if our humanness, our capacity to live fully, to sense freely, to feel, is rooted in our relationship to landscape and place? What if the two axis in my framework are actually dependent on one another and the only way to build a meaningful body of work worthy of reverence is to actively disconnect from the noise and live unattached to cultural relevance.

I believe Wendell Berry answers this in his poem, The Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

When my infant daughter was overstimulated and inconsolable during her first Christmas party this year, I carried her outside and we stood in the cold night air under the stars. She instantly calmed. Her mighty little heartbeat slowed and steadied against my chest. When the breeze rustled the bare trees around us, she instinctively twisted and stared, and in her eyes, wonder.

-Caleb