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Listening for the Ineffable

Writer's picture: Lucinda PepperLucinda Pepper

As a Gen Xer hitting middle age, Lucinda Pepper discovers that taking the next step is a controlled form of falling.


Photo of a bird flying above a utility pole.

Across from the window where I write is a pine pole over twenty feet tall, full of equipment that supplies the surrounding buildings with electricity and telecommunications. When I look at this pole I see changing technologies; some, like copper landline phone wires, are on their way to obsolescence.

  Anchored but not rooted, this pole leans. Three tiers of cables unspool down the alley.  The stems of a leafy vine clamber over one another, at least as long as the pole is tall, weaving together two tiers of the heavy black wires. Some stems appear dead but most are crowded with deeply-lobed leaves. The vine creeps with a long green reach across ceramic insulators, and like an avant garde cape fans out beyond the trunk.

  Once a tree, the pole is now an artifact-in-training, aged and pecked by beaks and drills.

  Past the utility pole are worn 19th century bricks and rusting steel siding, beyond that, the football stadium’s expanses of glass reflecting today’s dirty cottonball sky. Against the inertness of a constructed landscape, nature’s persistence burgeons every edge. The changing Midwestern climate brought a wetter spring this year and everything is verdant. Trees are heavy with neon whirligig seed pods. Birds harness the air, darting out of view, occasionally preening on a roof ledge, landing on the vines and lines. Sparrows and finches cheep loudly, puffing their rain-damp feathers. There they sit, sing and peer at the world.

  I marvel at nature’s adaptability.

  As I look out at this scene, a peculiar feeling begins transmitting from my soma and my psyche and my heart into my conscious awareness. Dès vu. I can feel everything changing, nothing being certain anymore. Things quantifiable, classifiable, and known are adapting and evolving, or becoming obscure and obsolete. I have a sense that I’m stepping across a threshold that I can never re-cross. It feels like that moment where my back foot has left the ground and my front foot hasn’t yet touched down.


 

 

I am five years into writing my current manuscript. On some of my writing days I don’t necessarily know what will come through. While I use a focused outline and I’m writing on specific topics, there are times that I practice just being in a state of presence until the messages appear. Over the course of these five years I’ve grown in ways I hadn’t ever tried to imagine. These expansions and healings of my heart space provide ever-new alchemy. What I’m writing, and the way I’m writing, consistently evolves.


 

 

This summer, I turned 48. No longer a distant future, 50 feels as close as the end of the block.

  Even as middle age introduces me to volatile physical and emotional experiences, I’m comforted to be here. Somewhere inside of me is a young queer, nonbinary person who didn’t expect to reach middle age. I have had to repeatedly adapt and find ways to live as my authentic self despite people who’ve harmed me and a culture that resists loving my humanity. My path to 48 has included lengthy periods of trauma and deep wounding. To actually be reaching midlife during this period of global upheaval feels like trying to find my way through an unfamiliar city when the power is out.

  I see myself reflected in nature’s slo-mo way of exploiting every sidewalk crack and utility pole: rooting in my authentic existence no matter where I’m planted; persisting without permission.


 

Lately I’ve read numerous articles that dissect the challenges and impacts of peak 65, a phenomenon in which the largest surge of Baby Boomers so far is beginning to reach the U.S. retirement age of 65. I was born to a couple of Boomers. I came in smack in the middle of Generation X. Reading about peak 65, I got curious about the other mass generational moment that isn’t being discussed: my generation in middle age. Nine years ago, the oldest Xers would have started to reach midlife. My digital digging has so far turned up a smattering of articles focusing on Gen X midlife crises, a few that frame us as grumpy and resentful that our generation hasn’t received the amount of attention paid to Boomers and Millennials.

  Those tropes situate our generational sense of unease at reaching this significant aging milestone in a personal, individual context, a move that continues a persistent judgmental narrative about Gen Xers. Like many stories told by and within dominant culture, those characterizations assign responsibility for what we’re experiencing to us alone, rather than locating the roots in systems that are determined to divide and conquer. That messaging does exactly the disservice it’s designed to do: build a greater divide between us at a time when we need to come together.


 

Birds perch and fly near a tall utility pole and power lines against a dusky sky, creating a dynamic, silhouetted scene.

Technology and industry are evolving rapidly. Both increasingly militarized crises and collective organizing for change are escalating at the pace of the internet. Climate cataclysms are becoming everyday headlines. Despite all that’s been written about these subjects, there is no blueprint for Gen Xers and Boomers to reference while crossing over these major personal thresholds amid the simultaneity of global transition. No map available will make sense of where we’ll end up. No diagram can explain how we’ll transition to a clean energy future, or how the generations ahead will power their world.

  Every future feels so uncertain.

  My intuition tells me that midlife is not the time of answers revealed, it is a time of deep inward change.

And in uncanny alignment with our current situation, this is a time for Boomers, Gen Xers, for every living adult no matter their generation, to dig in and do the work of personal transformation. Working on our own unhealed stuff is what will allow us to work together across our differences. This labor will help us become good future ancestors, capable of creating worlds we can actually be proud of leaving to the ones ahead.


 

 

When I was young, my dad took me and my siblings to climb a square tower of green-painted wooden stairs rising from the base to the top of a cliff. The green stairs, as they were known, were built in 1916 on the Mississippi river flats across from downtown St. Paul. They gave workers living in the bluff-top neighborhoods faster and easier access to and from downtown and their workplaces.

  During my childhood in the 1980s we went to the green stairs over and over again. As an adult reflecting on these experiences, I thought we had used this practical technology as a form of cheap entertainment. Except I was never entertained; fearful of heights, I would often freeze part way up, once I saw the tops of the utility poles receding below me.

  I aired my thoughts about these memories to my dad, and he divulged his primary intention: he took us up that stair tower to develop our courage.

  The stairs were constructed as thick wooden steps mounted on green-painted steel beams. There were no risers, so I could see the landscape beyond the tower as I climbed. Each landing was contained by rusted horizontal rows of railings. Some part of my brain knew I was in no real danger of falling, but as my family climbed up above me I could feel the staircase vibrating. My breath would constrict and I would cling to the banister. Caught between the ground and the sky, I didn’t know what I could orient to that would provide a sense of safety.

  Invariably, my dad would descend to coax me to the top. I exhibited immense willpower by overriding the danger signals my nervous system was flooded with and slowly, on shaking legs, with tears in my eyes, I would finally reach the top where I could run across the bridge and stand on rock-solid ground at the top of the cliff.

  Those courage-developing trips to the green stairs must have worked some magic within me.


 

Like seeing further into the distance between each step, middle age has a way of putting time into a different perspective. After a career in somatic healing intertwined with community building and social justice, I have finally committed to being the writer and artist I have always known myself to be. The risks and responsibilities of being a creative entrepreneur in midlife bring up lots of new fears. Everything depends on my skills and initiative and nothing is certain. I frequently need to call on my heart’s courage to steady my steps.

  What I’ve found, though, is that my courage is shaped as action in the face of uncertainty.

  When I sit down to write and words are seemingly resisting my call, I will sometimes write just one random sentence. Writing those few words actualizes the trust I have in myself to be present and get through the moment, no matter what it may hold.

 

 

Utility pole with tangled wires against a clear blue sky.

Gazing at the pole through my writing studio window, I wonder at the utility company and its workers who have allowed this vine to exist when they have the power to destroy it. I can sense the human hands, the craftsmanship that made and attached the crossarms, the insulators, the lightning arrestors. I can imagine people creating the steel screws bolting equipment to this pole; screws which could have been made in the screw machine shop my dad retired from in 2019. The mark of human decision-making has shaped this creation, taken from nature and made utilitarian. The utility pole is a technology invented in the mid 1800s. The vine is a technology stretching backward across millennia.

  The vine has reached the bottom of the transformer. As I follow the slender shoots I observe a lone green stem that has attached its suckers and is growing leaflessly upward in search of its next connection. Its tip actually protrudes into mid-air above the transformer’s top.

  I can’t help but reflect on our abounding collective precariousness. Each day now becomes a liminal space where the decisions we make ripple more profoundly outward.

  When I write the next word, and the next, I am reminded how taking the next step is a controlled form of falling.

  How will that green, searching vine shoot ever reach its next point of contact? So many things could happen: the wind could blow it astray, a bird could nip it shorter, the next utility worker might not be so kind.

 

The green stairs were damaged by a free-rolling limestone boulder falling off of the cliff, and were deconstructed in 2008. Plans made to replace them were thwarted by the budget challenges faced by the city during that recession.

  There is a time and a reason to let go of legacy technologies. Even when it means disrupting the way a landscape tapestry has been woven together for generations. Even when it means changing the skyline of the city. Even when it means rewiring maladaptive neurological survival mechanisms.

  Uncertainty fears are really the same thing as the fear of no foundation, or of support disappearing. There is always the risk that we might fall from whatever heights we manage to reach. Each time my own fears surface, I can viscerally sense little me clutching at the railing of the green stairs, a couple utility poles above the ground. I feel again the weird wind that exists up there, buffeting bird wings and shaking tree limbs. Again, my heart in my throat and my breath, caught, suspended.

 

 

The studio window is open an inch and a noisy downtown breeze puffs over the sill, scattering distraction across my papers. I lift my head, listening for something ineffable.


 

Lucinda Pepper is a writer, artist, speaker, and communications consultant who engages people in active love practices to interrupt interpersonal violence and reclaim self-belonging. Their favorite people to work and play with are those stewarding revolutionary visions for our world at the intersections of love, justice, reciprocity and care. Explore with them at LucindaPepper.com, on Instagram @realmxpepper and on Substack @mxlucindapepper.


Images:

Bird above the junction box by Jakob Pabis

Many birds by Jandra Sutton

Utility pole & camera by Annelize De Waal

112 views1 comment

1 comentário


fpcpoupore
15 de jan.

I feel, through your words, a profound drift as if the rug has been pulled out from our unsteady feet.

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