I started out last time by claiming that maybe this pattern started eight years ago, but that may be false, so let me retract just in case I’m wrong; I’m still sorting through the clues, see.
It’s hard to have transitioned from being a passive observer of such things to following the clues whole-heartedly, so thanks for your patience. I now use “thanks for your patience” in a lot of my work emails instead of “I’m Sorry” because I read that it makes you seem less passive, and people will take you seriously. I’m not sure if it works. It seems to me that assholes remain assholes no matter what you say to them. And just because I wrote Thanks For Your Patience doesn’t mean I feel any more confident or wise. I really don’t, I must report back; the words just continue on as a mask for my passivity. Can the words actually change me? Am I holding myself back by believing I can’t?
Anyway, I digress. The actual journey, like the trailhead, if being more concrete is helpful, I guess began in the shower a couple of days ago when I felt sad from how passive I was, but now I’m too old to blame it on anybody else except for myself, so I had to close my eyes and pretend I was in the bottom of a well and concentrate hard on how I ended up in the same shower from my teens.
That’s what the main character of The Wind-up Bird Chronicles does when he’s distressed (except, obviously, there’s a more elaborate reason why he goes into an actual well, whereas the key point for me was that it’s wet and shuts everything else out). I don’t really have a well, but a shower seemed appropriate enough. This is where most people’s vulnerable thoughts seem to exist, anyway. Why is that? Is it our nakedness? The cleansing? The heat?
Usually, I begin by measuring my belly growth. I’ve always had a rippled lower belly, and in the harsh light of my bathroom, it’s a good time to check on the progress of my occasional starvation. Did prolonging my eating time work? Is the scar from my fall in second grade more aligned now with my hip? Can I see my thighs or my toes?
Before you begin your Love Thyself lecture, I’d like to clarify that I am deeply appreciative of all the things my body can do, but usually it doesn’t happen in the shower. Doing that in the shower feels like when I say Thank You For Your Patience.
By the way, I tried taking only cold showers for about two months straight. There are already many articles on what it does for your body, so I won’t elaborate much on the experience, except that I transitioned to warm water when the weather got colder, because it stopped feeling refreshing to shower in cold water in the same temperature air. I can report back that for me, shower thoughts did not happen in cold water.
So anyway, in my shower-well meditation, after body inspection, I listened to what the universe was cueing me into. Because I’m short, I can stand at an angle in the shower where the water thoroughly envelops me, and so I can’t open my eyes because then it would hurt. This is when I usually think.
First, obviously, wells were showing up as a motif everywhere in my life. In the book (read my first chapter), in TV shows, in random tea houses and escapades I thoughtlessly chose, an actual physical well would emerge. If a reservoir is a type of well, and I’ll count it, it was the place I got to reconnect with old friends. In fact, maybe this is the true trailhead.
At the reservoir, my friend asked me, “What is your relationship with writing right now?”
I was aghast, because to be honest, it was very poor. I don’t remember what I said to her. Probably a form of Thanks For Your Patience. I don’t know if I’ve always really had even a relationship with writing. It could be more accurately described as an affair, or a couple of occasional night stands, if that makes sense. (Like a scattered series of one night stands).
I used to have instinctual gut feelings when I wrote something. Like I’d have a thought that I’d feel I desperately needed to claim first, out in the open, to the world, and it would actually physically feel like I needed to pee. Not very glamorous, I know. It would weigh on my stomach and the top of my bladder until I finally finished writing whatever it was.
But like any relationship, it seems like I’ve depended on those feelings too much. They might be inspired by jealousy, or anger, but I could never be consistent or make a proper commitment to it or how it could change. That’s why I can’t call it a relationship.
By the way, have you ever had a one night stand? I don’t feel comfortable revealing if I had but maybe you’ll form a hypothesis from the fact that I used the metaphor, though it is indeed, a common metaphor people use even if they haven’t done the words in reality. Once you begin acting on such hypotheses, you’re no better than all of the fake news sources on Twitter. Anyway consider “piece of cake” or “literally.” I find eating an entire piece of cake very difficult. The sweetness is overwhelming and it always makes me feel sick. I’d say that the only piece of cake I can really eat without feeling sick is the blueberry chiffon cake slices or the green tea cake slices from Paris Baguette because they’re so light, but even then… I wouldn’t prefer it. It’d be a lie to say I haven’t developed a sweet tooth though. It is inevitable from dating Andrew, whose appetite for sweets is undeniable. But that’s why I like him, if that makes sense, because to Andrew, a piece of cake is actually a Piece of Cake, and to me, that’s admirable.
Once, I briefly dated someone who couldn’t eat any spicy food. It was terrible.
I was going through a phase of exploration, because a couple of summers earlier, one of my grandparents’ siblings had held my hands, and as I waited excitedly for her piece of wisdom, she said: be in love with as many people as possible when you’re young.
It totally changed how I saw old people. I also don’t know if I’m now young enough to still be following such advice.
All to say… what I reflected on in my shower-well after the reservoir visit became a trigger for all of this writing. Unhinged, probably, but I hope, continuous. I guess, what I’m trying to say, is that through my well investigation, I’m trying to love as many versions of my writing as possible.
— —
Last time I mentioned the podcast series How I Built This which I don’t really listen to, but I do listen to Stuff You Should Know. And of course, it just so happened that when I was listening to an episode about the Freedom House Ambulance Service (a very cool episode, I might add), and when it ended while I was cooking and preparing dinner (yakisoba with chopped lettuce, carrots, bean sprouts, and pork), it auto-played to the next episode — Blue Holes.
I listen to Stuff You Should Know because it was recommended by Will and we listened to hours of episodes on topics ranging from vinegar to French fries to crushes on our drive back to the Bay Area from San Diego after a grueling first year out of college. I have a strange affinity for road trips, even if they are quite terrible and uncomfortable in the moment; I don’t think I was very close to Will before this trip, but it’s one I have fond memories of. Will is the exception I think of before I generalize all white men into one group.
Anyway, when the episode turned to blue holes, I got goosebumps all the way up to my shoulders (did you know in Korean goosebumps are called chicken skin? It feels more accurate because I don’t actually know what goose skin looks like); I remember being in the middle of peeling and cutting a carrot when I realized that this episode was all about a humongous kind of well that exists deep in the ocean, but might not have been in the ocean tens of thousands of years ago.
The cool thing about blue holes is that there’s a part of them that even the ocean cannot reach, and there’s no oxygen, so it preserves the passing of time, and especially scars from past weather, in a unique way. This is because there is a layer of hydrogen sulfide from decaying plant matter, and it has created this brown, visible layer through which technically, no life should exist below. You have to swim through it to get further into the hole. And divers, even with their separate oxygen tanks, apparently suffer skin reactions or nausea from the toxicity of that layer. But, life persists below it. There’s some kind of colony that digests things that fall into the hole, and turn it into sediment. Apparently, scientists can also track when the great Blue Hole was below or above sea level, and the changes of our environment. This all reminds me of Weathering With You, when that one old lady reminds the main character that Tokyo was once under the sea.
So most blue holes are these death traps that are one-way, but there’s a hole called the Green Banana in the Gulf of Mexico that acts like an oasis of life in a relative desert. In this sense, I would say it qualifies as a kind of well (before you point out that besides being a hole with water, how do these holes even connect to the pattern of wells?)
Apparently, scientists have found that sea levels have risen really quickly at different points in history. This makes me think of floods, and that perhaps I really should take a look at Noah’s story more closely.
Chuck and Josh, the hosts of the podcast, begin theorizing the reason why the Green Banana is a life source in a relative ocean desert. They considered underground springs — so are springs considered more natural forms of wells?
Which reminds me, that when I sang 깊은 산속 옹달샘, 누가 와서 먹나요? I had no idea what I was singing about all this time until this past January, when I was watching a documentary and learned that an 옹달샘 is like a well or a spring, a natural, deeper pool that occurs in the flow of a stream. The documentary episode was about people who chose not to live in Seoul (abnormalities, apparently) and live in isolated places in nature; this one couple lived in a deep, deep valley in Jirisan, and the woman was laughing and saying that she could be in the 옹달샘 naked and nobody would know or care.
How freeing. Would her shower thoughts be more elevated?
I actually can’t really think of places like that from streams here because I don’t think I’ve sought them out, but those swimmable spots in creeks are quite prevalent in Korea. I can remember one summer my cousin taking me around one in a tube after a grueling hike, and then the one near Geochang. I guess we have beaches here, or Alpine lakes if you drive and hike in for a few hours, but it’s not quite the same.
Maybe that will be the next adventure to book. Perhaps this is a clue.
