Friday Dispatch: I Have Slept in Many Places

Writing as a side door

Friday greetings,

The following writing emerged during this week’s session of Ebb and Flow, the 10-month writing group I facilitate on Tuesdays. As a prompt, we read I Have Slept in Many Places by Diane Seuss, followed by the poem with the same title by Denise Duhamel, explicitly after Diane Seuss. I suppose in a way, this is after both of these, like a game of poetry telephone.

It feels important to say that I share this in the wake of the bodies of brothers Ariel and Kfir Bibas being returned home to Israel. They were ages four and 10 months at the time of their murder, one month after being ripped from their home. Ariel loved his baby brother and superheroes and wanted to save people.

Also returned from Gaza was the body of Oded Lifshitz, age 84 at the time he was kidnapped, a retired journalist and lifelong peace activist who championed Palestinian rights and planted a cactus garden outside of the Kibbutz Nir Oz home he shared with his wife Yocheved, who was also kidnapped.

Kfir, Ariel, and Oded were held in Gaza for 503 days. The brothers were killed in November 2023. A fourth body – the bodies were marched through a cheering crowd in locked coffins with no keys – I can hardly bring myself to write that sentence – was originally said to belong to Shiri Bibas, but forensics discovered that to be untrue. (It belongs to an unidentified individual who doesn’t match any of the known remaining 66 hostages, 30 of whom Israel says are dead. May they all come home.)

I do not know how to process any of this. Somewhere in me, a rage simmers that I mostly keep a lid on – for better, for worse, difficult to say. Below that, searing grief. Incredulity. Frozenness that occasionally thaws then refreezes, like my driveway during this long, long February. As I write, I realize this feeling reminds me of the days and weeks after October 7, like when I wrote Still I Can’t Cry on October 11, 2023. It is all too much.

The only thing I know to do is find side doors into this landscape of loss and love.

For me, that’s where writing comes in, especially freewriting with a prompt and a timer. (This, by the way, is the premise of my whole book, in case you could use some help loosening the words.)

The other thing I know to do is, as I said to M.J. over dinner last night, to give thanks for the rough-hewn table where we sit and eat, where we can gather with people we love, where we can honor the memories of these bright, beautiful lights so brutally taken from us, honor them by living, by lighting candles and reciting prayers that have carried our people through so many periods of destruction.

We live. We love. We live. We learn. We live, love, and learn. We laugh. We wail. We remember. We honor. We argue. We go deeper. We do what we can. We praise the morning and the evening. We show up. We keep each other.

Be the light, be the light, be the light. And if your light is dimmed or flickering, a broken ember, take your time.

There is no chapter in our Jewish texts for how to mourn such deaths. We are on our own. No map. Our ancient sages could never envision such violence and pain. Hold one another. Sit besides those who cry. Say Kaddish for the innocent. Pray for humanity. 🧡
~ Rabbi Evan Schultz

I have slept in many places. Where even to begin?

Maybe with the places where I didn’t sleep. The desert, the rainforest. The cave by the sea with its roaring lullaby just outside.

On Wallace Street and West Fourth Ave, on Summer and South Winooski, on Sunset and Crescent, Mill and Bilodeau, Eames and Clymer, Harkness and Lessey, Henry and Maple, every one of these temporary, for what isn’t temporary but love?

On lizard scales and at the lip of roiling lava, purple fields of clover and honeysuckle. In a hotel bed where a bomb landed down the street. Also soundly through an earthquake in a dorm room near a mountain range you couldn’t see through the smog.

Head to toe in a skinny single bed with my mother and once on her couch when I held her tight like a frightened child as her father’s painting watched over us both. In my grown daughter’s apartment, in a cabin with my son. Nestled between them, nestled between.

I have slept atop a minefield, phone on, ready to bolt, red light blinking like a bedside nuclear reactor button.

On a raft in the middle of a pond, a cold star whose light had died a long time before, on the border of hell, with a family of seals barking gently at sunrise, entombed by ice during a heat wave, drenched in dreams, inside the sun.

In Paris with doves flapping, Spain with bells ringing, Mexico with dogs moon-howling, Russia in the orphanage quarantine, Prague in a guest house with a sing-song hostess, in a dank room in Oxford where I read Virginia Woolf and wasted away.

I have slept in so many places. Some of them were even home. I have slept in this same body my whole life. Why does it sometimes feel so unfamiliar?

On buses winding up mountains and in canyons under ancient constellations, against your comforting body for 13 years and counting.

I have slept so many times. Where does all the memory go? Backseats and back alleys, guillotines and galleys, cross-legged sitting up, crows cawing and hippos yawning and the book in my hands drooping, drool drooling.

I have slept nine months pregnant, impossible really, with a pillow between my knees. Postpartum with my baby on my breast, bliss. Between the lines of a sonnet, in the creases of a love letter, on a feather, in a birdcage, in a crawlspace, in the afternoon under a double rainbow.

I have slept so much of my life away, through entire seasons and centuries, all while some men grew more murderous while others became tree roots, mighty shelters for the living.

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Ufros Aleinu Sukkat Shlomecha ופרש עלינו סכת שלומך. Spread over us Your shelter of peace. This verse is from Hashkiveinu, which “envisions God as a guide and shelter during the night ahead and praises God for watching over us, delivering us, and being merciful.”

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May you sleep sheltered and loved.

May you know you are not alone.

May you remember to breathe.

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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