Ammi Midstokke: Finding grace in the cracks

I said a stupid thing recently, an embarrassing and shameful thing. It is not uncommon for me to embarrass myself, and one might argue I make a living doing just that. The difference this time was that my words hurt someone.

There is a pained thing that happens when the expression of those across from you is an unexpected suffering or confusion. I could not say what exactly was felt, but I knew my intentions had not landed, that damage had been done. I lay awake that night knowing the wrong, but not exactly knowing the why. And maybe this was the most embarrassing part of all.

I wanted a word to describe the kind of ignorance I was experiencing, one that did not defend my actions, but recognized the complicated existence of a bubble-wrapped white-girl from Idaho whose exposure to other cultures, religions, races and oppressed persons is limited at best, reckless at worst.

My visceral response to my gross faux-pas stuck in my system long after I had apologized, long after the impacted people had offered their kindness and generous patience in educating me. I was sick to my stomach and could not shake it. As usual, I sought refuge and wisdom in the wild.

It is funny how nature proffers the perfect places for perspective.

I crawled from the seashore into a dry river canyon, retreating from the wide expanses of a sun-swept sea into a shadowed and mysterious slash between mountains. The canyon walls rose above me, their towering cliff edges a wounded red gash in the lush green of cypress and oak and ivy. The rocks clattered beneath my clumsy steps, slick from the night’s heavy rains. Water pooled in muddy eddies, like the clouded memories of a once-river.

Not too long ago, I was driving through Portland, where I assumed the progressives had overrun the place with their left lean, pride flags, and welfare handouts of everything from new tents to fentanyl-for-the-poor and goggles for the rioters. Instead, I played leapfrog in traffic with a guy on a motorcycle, wearing a vest embroidered with intricate lettering across his broad back. It read “[Expletive] Your Feelings.”

Why he came to mind while the birdsong around me amplified like an orchestra in the narrowing canyon walls, I have no idea. But the birdsong and the biker alchemized into something. This shame I had was not representative of the now-forgiven incident. It was pointing to something more ancient and calcified in me, but it would take more miles and many more thorny scratches for me to dissolve it into a softer understanding.

The gorge I retreated into was dangerous and I knew this. There is no cell phone signal within it, no roads that cross it, no paths out, no option for rescue. This was a place I would traverse alone, and there was no margin for error. The only precaution I could take was to tell someone where I had gone, and to call I-don’t-know-who if I had not returned by nightfall. I carried on long after I ran out of food, long after I was tired. I was searching for surrender.

I do not often know what it feels like to be the oppressed, though my reproductive organs might disagree. I cannot imagine a sense of generational trauma that recycles itself in different iterations, across different geographies and political landscapes, through dining rooms and hushed conversations and stigma and discrimination and unjustifiable societal “norms” and systemic policy.

I desperately want to understand, because if I were a biker and had a custom-embroidered leather vest with tassels, it would read, “Tell Me Your Feelings.”

We all have them, though often disguised as virtues, values, politics, and righteousness. I suspect at the root of that is fear. This makes me feel sad. The biker made me feel sad. If other people’s feelings don’t matter, someone must have once taught him that his feelings do not matter. So what does a person do who bottles that all inside?

What would I do with the heavy stone of shame I was carrying? I knew it had an important message I was struggling to decipher. How many hours would it take me until exhaustion offered enlightenment? And would these marvelous birds tweet and peep and sing the soundtrack of my eventual salvation?

I have read that shame is an important social emotion, something to help us learn what is and is not allowed within the safety of our clans. But we have been misusing it, abusing it, so no wonder it is met with detachment, defensiveness, divisiveness. How else could we be allowing the cruel, violent, and crude rhetoric that is now normalized by our leaders?

I came to a place in the canyon where it was too perilous for me to proceed alone. Giant boulders had tumbled down from the mountain and made an impenetrable wall. Only a magical spell would allow one to the other side, and I did not even have a spotter. The sun peeked over the edge of a distant ridge, drying out a rock I sat on and offering something that felt like grace. It smelled like rain-washed marble and dripping moss.

We, the bumbling-fumbling-mumbling folk of this world, need grace. It is what lets us transform the sense of wrongness into learning and compassion. It is what heals wounds we cannot see, in ourselves and others.

I was too tired to cry, and maybe this was good because my gaze caught something in the shadows. There, on a rock near a stretch of trees that leaned over the ribbon of the riverbed was a cairn of alabaster-white stones, like a tiny beacon of behest. I clambered over to it and looked for what it was trying to show me. Only from this exact place of perspective could I see it, a narrow crevice between the heavy, fallen blocks of mountain, the path beyond illuminated by the afternoon light.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com