After the Retreat
Yesterday afternoon I listened to four women read their work, and something amazing happened. Earlier in the day I had heard of something called an orgasm headache, and I kept meaning to look it up to see if I’d ever had one.
Sometimes someone reads something so beautiful and clear and true and listening is like drinking water that has come from an icy source deep underground. It’s so cold and good it hurts, and it reminds you that living is a verb.
Yesterday I had four people, one right after another, read work that seemed to have sprung from wells deep inside of them, and I’m pretty sure I got an orgasm headache. It felt as though my skull were being stretched, that I was physically changed, larger. When the women were done reading, we walked down the street to Bad Martha’s and ordered some beers because I needed a place where I could put my head down on the bar and regroup.
It’s funny to me that truth and beauty can be something that you have to survive, that you have to become bigger, quieter, braver to listen to what is real and true and surprising. I avoid going to church because I am afraid of all those feelings, of having a church headache that maybe is really an orgasm headache. All that love filling the skull with insistent pressure.
You. Will. Be. Loved. It doesn’t matter how fast you run. Love is faster.
When people read you things they pulled from the well of themselves, you have swum in the waters of the holy, and nothing is ever the same.
The guy who poured my beer last night didn’t charge me because he heard me say I didn’t like the beer. I explained that I don’t like beer in general, but, not matter: no charge. I went back today with some dollar bills because I didn’t have any with me yesterday to live a tip. The guy gives the woman with her head on the bar a free beer and she leaves him nothing.
That’s such a stupid story.
Now, at least, he has four crumpled dollar bills to call his own.
And I get to sit with this headache that lingers and think about the woman who read their work, and wish them Godspeed and the space and means they need to keep writing.
