once the vessel cracks open

 "...But we’re not different sprouts from the same plant. I can’t be you; you can’t be me. You can imagine another well, but never quite perfectly, you know?"

For a week in the middle of the summer I traipsed through the hallways of a Navajo boarding school, through the red dirt roads of the Arizona desert, through conversation after conversation with highschooler and adult alike.  Each day I woke up early, drenched myself in icy water spitting from a faucet that scarcely came up to my shoulderblades, dressed myself in outdated jeans and a t-shirt, and walked into the cafeteria where dozens of little Navajo children ate breakfast each morning of the school year.  Each day, a hundred large brown paper bags, the type you use to pack lunch for not just one person, but three, covered the entire wall to my left.

Each bore the name of one person on our trip, some decorated simply, elaborately, intricately, humorously.  Some featured cacti with their arms outstretched, suns dancing across the brown canvas, rock formations sprouting happily from the earth.  Some made mention of a silly nom de plume, others reminded me to whom they belonged with a simple handwritten first name.

I found myself observing this wall every time I entered the cafeteria.  Each bag was so different; each told a story about the person who created it, just like the notes we would write to each other would.  Our task was simple: write kind words that would make someone feel warm and fuzzy, the feelings after which these notes came to be called.  We would write these warm and fuzzies throughout the week and deliver them to their respective paper bag homes.  At the end of our trip, we would untape our bag from the wall, dump out the pile of notes that had accumulated, and learn about ourselves through the words that others had written about us.

Throughout the week, I contemplated my notes to others.  More so than the two years before, I found myself realizing that writing these warm and fuzzies was truly the method of communication at which I could excel.  I found thoughts about people pouring into my brain from all directions, nice things to say accumulating with incredible speed.

Although I did not have a momentous event in my life to reveal to the group during our nighttime devotions, although I did not have a secret that I didn't even realize I was itching to reveal, more than anything else on the trip, I found myself obsessing over these written notes.  What I certainly could have thought of as a simple way to uplift someone's spirits by telling them that they had a lovely personality turned into this incredible project for me to undertake, propelled forth by this sudden desire, this sudden hunger to make people feel this warmth, this fuzziness using all the power that I had -- words.

I guess it's something that I always come back to, but it's true: the greatest power that I possessed was my ability to use words to dictate my thoughts.  I imagined the feeling that would overcome me if I received a note detailing the ways in which I had affected somebody's life, the tiny things they admired about me that I didn't even notice in myself.  From this imagination sprung my insatiable hunger to make people feel those same emotions.

I wrote and I wrote, about everything I loved and admired in people, about the ways in which they changed my life.  I put so much painstaking effort into trying to ensure that each person I wrote to understood the value and importance of their life in my own and in others', and I guess I didn't realize that the entire time I did so, I was hoping, praying that someone would write the same kind of note for me.  Selfish as it was, I suppose it was true -- I told people the things that I would appreciate hearing more than anything in the world, poured every one of my thoughts out in order to show each person exactly the things I would have liked to hear.

photo via grace brown ;)

Among my own warm and fuzzies, I received only a few that reached the level of personal depth that I attempted to put into the ones I wrote for others.  I would certainly not call it disappointment that filled me -- hearing any nice thing about yourself is enough to warm your stomach -- but I don't know how else to describe it. I wasn't disappointed because of what people had said about me, I was disappointed because of what people hadn't said.  I guess I just wanted to know that my existence made somebody, anybody, feel something.  But then something else was happening, something that made me feel warmer and fuzzier than any of the notes to me did.  A few people approached me after reading my notes, thanking me for putting so much thought into them -- and I wanted to leap for joy.

I have been thinking about it recently, and I have realized that I am not the type of person who would be able to approach someone to thank them for a handwritten note -- I am the person who would write this elaborate thank-you.  I have realized that words are the realm in which I know I am comfortable, and that others use other means to show other people their thoughts, like their actions or their voices.

Mostly, though, I have had to realize and accept that not everybody is me.  Not everybody communicates in the same way that I do, and not everybody will even be able to appreciate this method in the way that I hope they do.  I suppose what all of this really means is that I need to do things the way I can, show people how I feel using the tools that I am given, and accept with open arms the different ways in which others communicate.  We can never truly be one another, but we should try our best to understand in whichever way we know how.